Day 16 - Fangs
Summary: A few student interns at DALV notice some odd things about Mr. Masters. The reactions vary, to say the least.
"Hey, have you guys noticed anything… weird about Mr. Masters?" Tariq asked as he slid into his cafeteria seat. The other four interns at the table looked up.
Dylan was the first to speak up. "Not really," she said, looking back down at her lunch. "But I haven't really seen him much. They've had me practically locked in those server rooms downstairs since the data breach last week."
"They should just hire you at this point," Linh-Nhu said as she began to peel an orange. "You're basically doing the work of a full-time employee anyway."
"I'm just glad this is a summer stint. I'd be a dead girl walking if I had to deal with this on top of classes."
"Wait, wait," Tariq interrupted. "That data breach, wasn't it that weird ghost with the mullet that attacked last week?"
Dylan sighed and picked at her fried rice absently. "Unofficially? Yes. Officially? Apparently no. Something about having to deal with PR and all, since random CEOs from California apparently don't buy the whole idea of ghosts in the first place."
"You had better not be insinuating anything about Mr. Masters," Marc said hotly, unfazed by Dylan's woes. "Especially if you don't have evidence to back it up!"
"Whoa, man, take it easy," Tariq said. He raised his hands in a placating gesture. "Who said I was insinuating anything? I'm just curious is all."
"I did overhear him talking to someone named Maddie over the phone the other day," Linh-Nhu offered. "I don't know what they were talking about, I was just passing by his office, but I was just confused because I could've sworn Mary-Claire said that Maddie was his cat."
"He's filthy rich," Dylan said, pointing with her fork. "Rich people always do wacky things like talking to their cats on the phone."
Tariq shook his head. "Nah, I'm not talking that kind of weird. I mean more like, physical things you've noticed about him."
Marc slammed his water bottle onto the table with a little more force than was probably necessary. "Nope! Nuh-uh," he said, wrinkling his nose into a look of disdain. "We should not be having this conversation in the first place! Do you realize how much trouble we'll get in if someone overhears us?"
"Please, no one pays attention to the interns of all people," Dylan retorted. She flipped her long brown ponytail over her shoulder. "I should know. My supervisor keeps calling me Diane. Any time I tell him it's Dylan, he thinks I'm talking about the other Dylan, and he quit three weeks ago to move to Dallas."
"Katarana, you haven't said anything," Tariq said, panning his eyes to the fifth and final member of their little intern group. "Have you seen anything weird going on with Mr. Masters?"
Katarana was still staring at Tariq with wide eyes. "No way," she whispered. Then, with much more energy, "You've seen it too?"
"Seen what?"
She turned her head to Linh-Nhu, who had asked the question. "Vlad Masters is freaky," she told the table. "We're talking major freaky vibes."
"Will you stop?" Marc hissed. "We cannot be talking about our boss like this!"
Dylan shrugged. "Free country, bro. What's he gonna do to us?"
"Oh, hmm, I don't know, how about fire us from one of the most prestigious internships in the country?"
She just grinned impishly. "And go back to Delaware, where I don't have to worry about some dumb ghost thing interrupting my commute? Or try and steal all my cereal boxes again? Sign me up."
"Marc, just shush for a minute, I wanna hear what Kat has to say," Tariq said, flapping a hand dismissively at Marc. The latter drew his thick eyebrows together in a deep frown.
Katarana met each of their eyes in turn. "They say you can hear him talking in his office to other people, but when you open the door, he'll be all alone. And others will swear up and down that the room will literally get hotter when he walks into a room, especially if he's in a mood."
Tariq scoffed. "Yeah, the same thing happens with my mom when she finds my dad's sports magazines lying around all willy nilly. Come on, I'm looking for the juicy stuff here! I wanna see if any of you saw what I saw."
"Your dad still gets actual, physical sports magazines? Like, in the mail?" Dylan said, eyebrows raised in disbelief.
"I'm being serious here!" Katarana insisted, completely ignoring Dylan's comment. "Jarvis told me the thermostat was reading 80 after a conference call gone wrong."
"Wait." Linh-Nhu frowned as she tried to process the information. She'd grown quiet and serious just within the past minute. "Am I the only one here from Amity Park?"
"I mean, I literally just got done talking about going back to Delaware, sooo…" Dylan shoveled a forkful of rice into her mouth.
"Not me," Tariq said. "I basically go to school in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. And honestly, I thought I was applying to the main branch for DALV in Madison."
"I told them I was good with either," Katarana said, shrugging. "Anything to get out of freaking Texas."
"I haven't lived in Amity Park, but I've basically been close enough," Marc told the group. "Grand Rapids. About an hour or so north of here."
"Bro, in what universe is an hour up the road 'close enough'?" Tariq asked.
Linh-Nhu simply nodded. "So none of you have experience with ghosts," she said. It was a statement, not a question. "Because if you did, you would know that Katarana's claims are absolutely plausible."
"What?" Marc screeched. "There is no way someone can heat a room just by entering it! Especially our boss, who gave us these jobs, need I remind you!"
"Says the guy who tried to say he pretty much lived here," Dylan muttered under her breath.
"Wait, seriously?" Katarana said to Linh-Nhu. "I mean, not that I didn't believe it was possible, but it has to do with ghosts?"
Linh-Nhu hesitated. "Possibly," she conceded, "but not for certain. Here, it's a well known fact that ghosts tend to have an effect on their immediate external environment, especially in times of heightened emotion or power. Most make it colder - especially a ghost such as Phantom - but there have been known to be some who can make the environment warmer instead."
"How do you know all this?" Tariq asked. His eyes shone with a curious thirst, and accusation was nowhere to be found in his tone.
Linh-Nhu blushed. "I graduated from Casper High. It turned into a hotspot for ghost activity during my senior year," she explained. "Plus I, um, might have sat in on one of Dr. Fenton's public lectures. Or… more than one."
"So you're saying Vlad Masters is a ghost?" Katarana breathed. Dylan whistled, impressed.
"Oh, no! Nothing like that, of course. But… it's certainly possible that ghost activity could be involved."
"Both of you!" Marc seethed. "If you don't quit making false accusations against Mr. Masters, I'm going to report you!"
"She literally just got done saying she wasn't making any accusations!" Dylan said, gesturing towards Linh-Nhu, who had hidden her face behind her dark hair. "Like what is your deal, man? Why go so aggro all of a sudden?"
"Well, excuse me for having a sense of preservation about this internship!" he shot back. "Do you know how hard I worked to get here in the first place? This is one of the most competitive internships in the country! I had to go through a lot to make sure I got this job!"
"We all worked hard to get here," Katarana said as she folded her arms across her chest. "Doesn't make you any more special than the rest of us."
"Can we go back to the part where Mr. Masters is potentially involved in some ghost crap?" Tariq whined. "I wanna tell you what I saw!"
"No one's stopping you," Dylan said. "Well, other than Marc apparently."
Marc had buried his head into his arms. "We're so getting fired," he moaned, his voice muffled by his sweater.
Katarana practically glommed onto Tariq. "Do you have proof he's a ghost or something?" she asked with her eyes gleaming in excitement.
"Alright, alright," he said. He moved his arms in the universal 'quiet down' movement. "Gather 'round, kids, 'cause you won't believe what I saw him do earlier."
"I don't know. You have to have a pretty open mind to live in Amity Park," Linh-Nhu muttered quietly, the hints of an amused smile on the corners of her lips.
"Okay, so I'm in the copy room, right? Trying to un-jam one of the printers after it ate my reports. In walks Mr. Masters, and he's on the phone going on about some deal with the S. Culcar client. He's like, super up in arms about it all for some reason, and it literally gets to the point where he growls into the phone!" Tariq said, waving his arms theatrically.
"Growled? Like, a dog or something?" Dylan asked through another mouthful of her rice.
"Yeah, basically! It was so weird, but it wasn't even the weirdest thing!"
"Because things can get weirder than a business mogul growling at one of his clients?" Dylan deadpanned.
"Oh, they absolutely can," Tariq said with the air of someone trying to create a mystery. He took a long, dramatic swig from his Dr. Pepper before continuing. "He keeps getting angry, something about a failure to find someone, or something, I don't know. But anyway, he yells something, and he's got his teeth all bared and stuff, like he was seriously channeling a dog or something. And I look over, just cause he's being so loud and stuff, and he's literally got fangs showing."
The table was silent for a long moment. "Wait, hang on," Katarana said, waving her hands. "You're telling me Mr. Masters has fangs? Like he's some sort of lion?"
"Yes! Exactly!" Tariq exclaimed with a vigorous nod. Clearly, he was waiting for a different sort of response.
"You know, some people just have really sharp canines," Marc said, apparently interested enough in the conversation to temporarily get past his resistance to it in the first place. "Are you sure it wasn't just that?"
"Nuh-uh. These things were bonafide fangs, all long and stuff and poking into his lip and everything!"
"Do ghosts even have fangs?" Dylan asked. "I thought they were supposed to be all gooey and stuff inside. Or something, anyway. I guess the two ghosts from last week weren't super gooey."
"Ghosts can present in a number of different ways," Linh-Nhu said, re-launching into her teacher voice. "Many are humanoid, like Technus and Phantom - the two from the 'data breach' you're talking about. Some are more blob-like, others are more like animals. Really, they can take any form, as far as I'm aware."
"Oh! Oh! What about that thing they can do where they can possess people?"
Linh-Nhu hummed. "I don't know if that would necessarily alter a person's appearance. Usually the ghost takes over the person from the inside to avoid detection. I don't know much else about that, though. I suppose there were a number of students and teachers who were possessed during that first major ghost attack, but they didn't show any physical signs, I think."
"So then he is a ghost?" Tariq asked.
"I still think we need to wait to make calls like this until we have certain proof," Marc said, his chin propped up on his arms lying on the table. "I might not be from here, but I've been here long enough to see that one couple, the… Fontaines? Finleys? I'm not sure. Either way, I don't want to lose my job and find myself on the wrong end of one of those guns."
"But if he's a ghost, or possessed by one - whatever - shouldn't we tell someone?" Katarana frowned. "Like the one ghost kid who stopped Techno-babble or whoever it was."
Linh-Nhu laughed lightly. "I'd be impressed if you could track him down. He's a slippery one."
Dylan suddenly slammed her hands on the table, startling the other four interns. "I got it!" she shouted. Her voice drew the attention of a few other employees sitting nearby.
"Think about it!" she continued. "Those fancy suits, the whole white-hair-at-the-age-of-40 thing, now the literal fangs and have you seen how pale that man is? There's an obvious answer: Vlad Masters is a vampire!"
The table fell into a stunned silence again.
"Well, at least he's a vampire who pays his interns," said an utterly defeated Marc, letting his head fall back into his arms.