2.
Uran stood outside the abandoned house and looked up at the broken windows on the second floor. "I don't understand how Coby could say with a straight face that there aren't any ghosts," she thought out loud, "He and Astro both saw Tobio. Guess I'll just have to get proof."
She made her way up the creaky steps and pushed the front door open. The place was even spookier than she had remembered, but with all the broken widows and the hole in the roof letting in the wind and the rain, it made sense that the house would have gathered a fresh coat of grime and mold.
As Uran made her way deeper into the house, she brushed up against a cob web, and a spider dropped down in front of her from the ceiling. "Yuck!" she gasped, quickly backing away. "Anybody here?", she quavered.
Suddenly, a chill ran down her back, as if a cold wind had just blown into the room. Uran's electronic brain was sensitive to the thoughts of animals, and she now wondered if she was also empathic towards ghosts as well. Broken glass crunched under her feet as she made her way to the stairs. Carefully she held onto the rickety banister, as she made her way up to the second floor. The stairs groaned under her weight as Uran carefully tested each tread before putting her full weight on it. Once on the second floor landing she turned towards the bedrooms. The empathic tickle that she'd felt when first entering the house had grown stronger, the buzzing in her head was getting louder with each step.
"GO AWAY!", a voice yelled from inside of her head. "LEAVE ME ALONE! I DON'T WANT TO HURT YOU!"
Floating in front of her was the upper two thirds of the body of a young boy. The legless apparition was totally gray in color, as if it was a black and white holographic projection. Uran recognized the image as Tobio at once. He seemed helpless and weak just floating there, tears dripping down his face.
"Tobio, is that you?", Uran quavered in a shaky voice.
"PLEASE GO AWAY!, I WARNED YOU!", the apparition begged.
Uran hesitated, part of her was frozen in terror and wanted to run, but a stronger part of her wanted to communicate with the deceased child that had been the source of inspiration for her brother's creation. She took one tiny step towards the ghost.
Suddenly, Tobio's apparition melted. The face of the innocent cherub morphed into that of a beast with long fangs for teeth, set in a huge snout. A violent roar came from the poltergeist's mouth, followed by a river of a gooey green viscous fluid. Uran tried to turn and flee, but she couldn't move in time. She ran down the steps, falling the last meter as the treads broke under her feet. She emerged from the house drenched in a sticky green goo that covered her entire body. Uran didn't stop running until she was a block and a half away from Tenma's old house.
"Yuck!", she yelled, looking down at herself, "Tobio slimed me!"
Reno used a spatula to scrape a jarful of the green gunk from Uran's skin and clothing. He then put some of the goo onto a glass slide, and put that under a microscope. Carefully he focused the instrument as he peered into the eyepiece.
"Doesn't seem to be any micro organisms growing in that stuff," he said. "I don't see any nanites either, so you're probably safe."
"Can I shower it off now?" Uran asked.
"Sure, go ahead," Reno said. "Use the bathroom in Tenma's old lounge down the hall."
Astro wandered into the laboratory, just as his sister passed him in the hallway. "What's going on?", he asked, "What happened to Uran?"
"I'm not sure," Reno said, shrugging his shoulders. "Your sister ran in here covered with this crap," he said, holding up a mason jar filled to the brim with a gooey green slim. "She said she went over to Tenma's old house looking for proof about ghosts, she said she wanted to see Tobio's ghost."
"I know Cobalt and I told her we saw Tobio in that house," Astro said, "But we never really thought it was a ghost. Both of us have memories of Tobio, and we just figured that something in that house was interacting with our A.I. to create the illusion of us seeing him."
"Well Uran never did have a physical connection to the real Tobio, so how do you explain her seeing him in that house?", Reno asked.
"Is that what she told you?" Astro asked.
"Hai," Reno nodded. "She also said that his apparition 'vomited' on her. That's what is in this jar."
"Yuck!", Astro voiced. "What is that stuff?"
"Well from what I've read on line, it's ectoplasm," Reno said. "According to a white paper authored by E. Spengler and R. Stantz, this stuff is, quote, 'a supernatural viscous substance that is supposed to exude from the body of a medium or a supernatural being during a spiritualistic trance and forms the material for the manifestation of spirits'".
"So you're saying that Uran actually saw Tobio's ghost, and that said ghost attacked her by vomiting this ectoplasm all over her?", Astro said.
"No, that's what she said," Reno answered, "but so far, I see no reason to doubt her."
The emperor tossed and turned in bed, not able to sleep. He got out of bed, and walked the halls of the palace rubbing his eyes. There wasn't any reason that he could think of for his insomnia, he hadn't eaten a particularly large or spicy meal before retiring for the night, nor were there any pressing issues of state weighing heavily on his brain. After drinking a tall glass of water, he made his way back to his bedroom. Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks, staring straight ahead. Hanging in mid air, just in front of him was a vaporous image. The upper torso and head of the Shōwa Emperor blocked his path back to the bedroom. "Otōsan?", he muttered, again rubbing his eyes. As he stared, the spirit moved forward and it's vaporous being passed through him and disappeared. Akihito quickened his pace and made his way back to the bedroom. After several minutes of tossing and turning, he finally did manage to fall back to a troubled sleep.
Dr. O'Shay sat in the sofa chair, leaning back and reading the 新聞. Sitting on the coffee table, next to his easy chair, sat a thick book containing reprints of classic Manga that he had been reading earlier. He was having difficulty keeping his eyes open, so he put the newspaper down attempted to lift himself out of the chair when a strange feeling came over his entire being. The professor felt a bit light headed when a fog slowly appeared in front of him. Gradually, the fog began to coalesce into an apparition. Floating in front of him was the ghostly figure of an old man dressed in frumpy sweater. The figure had a bulbous nose, and wore thick horn rimmed glasses and a beret cap. The man smiled at the professor, and doffed his cap before fading away the same way he had appeared.
Quickly, O'Shay grabbed the thick Manga collection from the table, and rapidly flipped though it's pages. Suddenly he stopped, and stared at a biographical page, that had a photograph of the very same face that had just floated in front of him.
Yuko Kisaragi was having a bad dream. She felt hot, as if her body were lying out int the sun on top of a bed of glowing, fiery coals. She was in the middle of a glowing red fog that drifted about her, each step that she took echoed and reverberated as if she were inside of a vast cave. She suddenly seemed to snap out of the trance when a loud, deep voice, bounced around inside of her head. "ZUUL!"
Her eyes snapped open and for a split second she swore she was floating naked three feet above her bed. An instant later she felt herself fall, landing hard on top of the soft mattress, covered with her sheets and blanket. She looked down at herself, and discovered she was still wearing the nightgown that she had put on before getting into bed. A second later, the alarm clock sounded, and she reached for the button to silence it.
A dream, she thought, breathing heavily to calm herself, it was just a bad dream.
Astro glanced back and forth between the professor and Yuko. "The two of you don't look so good," he finally said, "I may be a robot, but I can tell when a human being didn't get enough sleep."
"It shows, doesn't it?", the professor sighed. "I fell asleep reading the newspaper in my easy chair during the night, only to wake up seeing a ghost. I hope it was only a bad dream, but I never did fall back to sleep once I got into bed."
"Compared to my night, that was a vacation," Yuko said. "I think I dreamed I was in a hellish place. I woke up covered in sweat when my alarm clock woke me this morning."
Dr. O'Shay had been reading his emails when Astro had walked in. "Yuko, it looks like the two of us weren't the only ones having difficulty sleeping last night. I've got an email from the Emperor. He wants someone from the ministry to discreetly examine the palace for the supernatural. He claims he was haunted by the Shōwa Emperor last night.
"Well, that's four ghost stories in two days," Reno said. The boy roboticist had been quietly standing in the doorway while the three way conversation had been going on.
"Four?" the professor asked.
"If you include Uran," Reno replied. She came into my laboratory yesterday covered with ectoplasm. She told me she'd been ghost hunting in Tenma's old house and got caught by Tobio.
"Ectoplasm?" the professor asked.
"According to Spengler and Stantz, close contact with a free roaming spirit can cause a physical manifestation of psychic energy resulting in the release of spiritual bodily fluids."
"Huh?"
"Ghost vomit," Reno explained. "Hey, if you don't believe me, I've got a pint of the stuff on ice in my laboratory."
The conversation was then interrupted by the ringing of the professors phone. O'Shay picked up the instrument to answer it, "Moshi Moshi, yes hello inspector, what?, you want me to what?, actually I do believe you, yes, I promise we will look into it." He hung up the phone, and looked on his computer screen.
"What the hell is going on?", Astro asked.
"I guess you heard both ends of that, Astro," the professor said. "Well, it seems that the police have had a busy night chasing ghosts too. One of them even stole a police car."
"What?" Reno asked.
"A squad car roared out of the police motor pool at 3 am with no one driving it," O'Shay said. "Except that someone managed to snap this picture on their cell phone."
The professor turned his computer monitor around to show the attachment from Tawashi's email. It clearly showed an ugly green blob of a ghost, behind the wheel of a metro city police car, a big cigar clamped in its mouth.
"Something weird is going on," O'Shay said. "I think we may be a bit out of our league on this one. I don't know who I'm going to have to call for help."
"I think I do," Reno said. He walked up to the doctor's computer, and quickly entered a URL on the browser. ' ghostbusters dot boo' "I ran across these guys yesterday while I was researching ectoplasm. Seems there was a similar rash of spectral problems in New York City a few years back. The Ghostbusters took care of it."
"I guess I'm going to have to contact these guys," the professor said. "but given the time difference, I'll have to wait till 7pm to catch them if they open for business at 9am."
Janine Melnitz dropped her purse on her desk and turned her computer on. She eyed the clock on the wall, and noticed that she'd managed to arrive a bit early, though she knew she wasn't the only one of the team in the building. Peter Venkman, and Ray Stantz both usually slept in upstairs, in what had been the fire house's bunk room, while Egan Stantz often pulled all nighters that lasted for days doing his research and laboratory work. Judging by the muffled sound of a small explosion coming from the upper rear of the building, that's exactly what he was doing at the very moment.
Just as the minute hand of the clock reached the '12', with the hour hand at '9', the phone started ringing. "Already?", Melnitz swore. She had a slight headache, having been to a boring party the night before, where she might have had a few too many. She picked up the phone and barked, "Ghostbusters, what do you want?"
Dr. O'Shay's command of the English language wasn't at a very comfortable level for him, so he had Astro on the extension as a translator. "I don't think she's had her morning coffee yet, Hakase," the boy robot offered.
In somewhat shaky, but quite understandable English, the professor spoke in a calm voice, "This is Dr. O'Shay with the Japanese Science Ministry. We seem to have a growing supernatural problem here in Tokyo. Can I speak with a member of the Ghostbusting team?"
Despite her mild hangover, Melnitz realized that this might not be the usual morning crank call. "You for real?" she barked.
"Hai!, I mean Yes I am!", the professor stated.
"Hold the line!", Janine voiced dropping the phone and pounding her fist on the intercom.
"Someone get the phone, we have a live one!" she yelled into the box.
Ray Stantz rolled out of bed in his boxer shorts. He managed to find the phone on the night stand, but only succeeded in knocking the instrument to the floor. With the grace of a bull in a china shop, he grabbed the handset and fumbled to get it to his ear, backwards at first. Finally, he sat down on the edge of the bed and put on his best business like voice. "Good Morning Ghostbusters at your service, how can we be of help?"
Dr. O'Shay, listened for Astro's translations as he tried to make himself understood. The boy robot occasionally injected a translation when necessary. "Good evening from Tokyo. Just recently, we've started to have some strange things happen. Please keep what I'm going to tell you confidential, I'm sure our government wouldn't want the news services to pick up on this."
"The Ghostbusters pride themselves on confidentiality," Ray quickly answered, "please continue!"
"Several members of my staff have experienced supernatural manifestations, and the Emperor himself was haunted by the ghost of his father a night ago," the professor replied.
"We can be over there in 48 hours, if you want to hire us," Ray said, "I promise you we will get to the bottom of this!"
"Excellent!", O'Shay answered, "I'll have my assistant contact you to iron out the necessary details."
Ray heard the line go dead on the other end. "My god," he thought, "They didn't even ask about the cost!"