A/N: Okay, when I wrote the previous chapter, it was BEFORE the latest season premier! I swear, the facial hair was purely a coincidence! I haven't kept up with NCIS in a while, so I've been missing all the promos that showed Tim with facial hair.
I do apologize for the longer wait than I've done between chapters lately. My husband, a cable technician, switched to a different department because an opening he wanted became available and we've had to adjust to his new schedule. I'm also recovering from a kidney infection, so I've been out of it on pain meds the last handful of days.
Don't forget about the poll on my profile! I'm going to keep it up until October 28th. At that point, I'll start working on my expansion project for my four NCIS fics.
Review Replies:
Gottahavemyncis: Unfortunately, it'll be another few chapters before the plot swings back towards DC. I have a few plot points I need to set up in Milwaukee with Tim and the Paranormal Gang if I want to have Tim returning to DC with any sense of promptness, so I gotta skip over the MCRT for a little bit longer.
Crawcolady: I admit, Adrian Fisher is the type where he wishes he could just drop Tim in Witness Protection and forget about him because it would make his own job easier, but Tim is a special case where he's not slated to stay in Witness Protection permanently. Tim's only in it until the FBI can deal with the group that put the hit on Tim's head. To put it plainly, Fisher is just an ass. He's not a designated antagonist in the plot. As for the team, see my reply to Gottahavemyncis.
Momcat: You didn't miss a clue about Doggy Jethro, so don't worry. I simply don't have a good way of adding the specific scene where he's told Tim is still alive without adding a filler chapter. I prefer to avoid those, if possible, since I've already done a couple for this story. Tim and Alice are friendly because, as I explained to Crawcolady, Tim's not meant to be in the program permanently. As far as Alice is concerned, Tim is still Special Agent Timothy McGee of NCIS and she treats him as such as often as possible without blowing his cover. And you've nothing to worry about with Rocco or Fisher. Fisher is just an ass, like I stated to Crawcolady. Rocco, on the other hand, is like Alice in the sense that he's looking forward to Tim returning to DC. The beginning of chapter 9, 'Event Six', explains Rocco's motivation for giving Tim the DVD of his own funeral.
My replies were a bit longer than usual, but I had a lot to cover! Remember, I'm more than glad to answer any questions you may have if it doesn't interfere with me revealing things via the story. I'm of the frame of mind that having a better understanding of background details of a story helps create a better appreciation for it. :)
Event Thirteen
Tim stood in the middle of the grocery aisle, debating over which brand of pizza sauce he should get or if he should do a batch of homemade. He had finally talked himself into making homemade pizza after remembering the recipe Tony taught him, but Tim wasn't sure if he should go all out the first time he made it or wade in with 'cheater' ingredients. Tim was sure the others would interrogate him if he went completely homemade. Thinking back to the last time they all decided to gang up on him with questioning, Tim glanced over the brands again and grabbed a jar of one he knew at least tasted decent.
"First time making homemade pizza?" A nearby shopper spoke up, an amused look on her face. Tim turned towards the woman with a confused look, surprised that a stranger spoke to him, but he quickly moved past it. Random strangers being helpful was something he was still getting used to. It happened back in DC, sure, but it happened to him more times here in Wisconsin than the previous five years in DC.
"Uh, no," Tim answered. "I'm debating if I wanted to anger my Italian friend's dead grandmother by going with store-bought sauce in her recipe."
"Tempting the dead, then, I see," the woman said with a hand motion to the jar of sauce in Tim's hand.
"I like to live dangerously," Tim cracked. He set the jar in his cart and paused when he realized that the woman was still looking at him. "Uh, was there something you needed help with?"
"No. I was just wondering if you should be trusted to make a homemade pizza that tastes good if you choose store-bought sauce over homemade when the recipe calls for homemade," the woman joked.
She's flirting, Tim thought with horrified realization. A relationship was currently not on his radar because he fully intended on going back home to DC. He avoided going to bars with the others for that very reason. Perhaps he'd have a better chance at avoiding women if he did go bar hopping with them.
"I'll be sure to ask my friend about that when I return home after my vacation," Tim said. Sure, it was a double-layered lie – he wasn't on vacation and he wasn't returning home any time soon, as far as he knew – but it was the best line he could come up with at a moment's notice.
"Well, I'm sure he's confident in your cooking abilities if he trusted you with the recipe," the woman said, her face showing her disappointment that Tim wasn't in the area permanently. She gave him one last smile before walking away. Jade walked up from the end of the aisle, giving the woman's back a confused look after passing her.
"What was that about?" Jade asked, setting a couple packets of yeast in Tim's cart.
"Nothing," Tim said quickly. Jade's 'answer me' look, however, had Tim sighing in defeat. "I avoid going to the bars with you all to avoid having women hit on me. I didn't expect it in the middle of a grocery store!"
Jade burst into laughter, needing to grab at the cart to steady herself.
"Oh, come on. She looked cute!" Jade exclaimed, motioning in the direction the woman had gone.
"Jade," Tim said evenly, rolling his eyes at her continued laughter. "Last I checked, you knew damn well that I'm not in the best position to be entertaining a woman's flirtations."
"It's still funny seeing a guy be completely thrown off by being hit on," Jade defended herself, taking steady breaths to calm herself down.
"Can we just get back to our shopping trip? I have no idea where anything is in this store. You insisted on coming here, not me," Tim said.
"Fine, fine, fine," Jade said. She took the shopping list out of Tim's hand and skimmed over it, comparing it to whatever they already had in the cart. "We can probably head over to the meat department now to grab everything we need from there. I'm sure the others are wondering why we're taking so long."
"Is this typical for you all to do before you head off to film on location? A party night?" Tim asked. He took his list back and began pushing the cart down the aisle.
"Yeah. It's our own little way of bring good luck on ourselves. If we leave happy, then we'll return happy," Jade explained.
"I know you all believe in the paranormal, but I didn't take any of you to be superstitious," Tim said. Jade shrugged.
"Not so much, but it definitely doesn't hurt to hope for good luck while we're there. Abandoned schools are their own kind of animal when compared to other job sites," Jade said. When she didn't say anything further, it was Tim's turn to give her a look to make her keep talking. "Schools, especially older ones, have seen so many years of bullying, of harassment, of juvenile drama and anger that it leaves a rather unique... stain... behind. We'll be dealing with a lot of remnant energies that aren't even spirits."
"Just do me a favor and don't bring any of that back. Bad enough I've got some of the living angry with me. I don't need the dead angry with me, either, for any reason," Tim joked.
"Says the man about to make Nana DiNozzo's homemade pizza with store-bought sauce," Jade shot back. She snorted in amusement and walked ahead to lead the way to the meat department.
"And tell Kate that she's a snitch!" Tim called out to Jade's back.
"Okay, so this is all the equipment that you need," Tim checked with Edmund.
"Yeah. We should be set for the entire shoot. If we forgot anything, we'll call and ask you to overnight it to us FedEx," Edmund said. "Given the size of the campus, it's going to take us a while to properly check the entire thing out. We haven't worked on one this large before. It's going to take us a while before we're able to find key filming locations."
"As long as we focus on locations mentioned in local lore first, we should be alright. We may get away with not checking out a few areas. We usually do," Clark said.
"Not this time, Clark," Jade spoke up as she entered the equipment room where Tim, Edmund, and Clark were. "It's been over a decade since paranormal investigators were last allowed on the property. The network wants us to do a full rundown of the property to reassess where the hotspots are."
"Hotspots?" Tim looked at Jade with confusion. He was beginning to get used to the jargon they used around the shop, but that was a term he knew they hadn't used around him before.
"Hotspots are locations of peak activity. Best place to get EVPs. Best place to get images. Best place, in general, to get anything you need during an investigation. Think of them as the volcanoes of the paranormal. You can technically get lava anywhere on Earth if you try hard enough and dig deep enough, but it's always best to go where the lava comes to you," Jade explained.
Tim thought the comparison was apt, now that he understood the term. If there was a specific spot that made talking with spirits easier, he knew he'd want to know about it.
"So if you have to hold a séance because you're having difficultly speaking with any of the spirits there, you're going to hold it in one of the hotspots you find?" Tim asked.
"Dear, god, no!" Clark exclaimed, his face showing a horrified expression at the idea.
"No, Tom," Jade said, throwing Clark a glare for his dramatic reaction. "We use a séance as a beacon, meaning doing one on an active hotspot would lead to a stampede of spirits, both good and bad, trying to get back to this plane of existence. We need a more controllable flow of spirits that we can interact with, so we perform them in a coldspot. A place that's completely void of spiritual activities. We hold back on holding séances until one of two criteria are met because of how extreme of a result it gives us. One, all the current hotspots are tapped and we're just not getting anything. Or two, there are no hotspots at a location and we need to create a temporary one."
"Like Edmund said, the campus is huge. Do you think you'll have to worry about not having any hotspots?" Tim said. He zipped up the equipment bag he had finished packing and pushed it towards the end of the table so Edmund could track it on the inventory sheet of equipment they were taking with them.
"Doubtful. Schools as old as the one we'll be investigating rarely go cold. As bad as juvenile bullying and drama is today, it was absolutely horrendous back when the school was new," Jade said. She peaked over Edmund's shoulder to skim the inventory sheet before walking around the table to join Tim as his end. "However, that reminds me. I have a favor I need you to do for me, Tom."
"Which is?" Tim asked, turning his full attention to Jade.
"The network's research team is terrible at getting the full history of a location for us. We've been burned by them before by having surprises show up in the middle of an investigation, so I was hoping you'd look into the background of the school once the team is en route. The building is too old to have such a simplistic history as the network's research team is claiming. Call one of us immediately if you find anything. And keep calling if you don't get an answer," Jade said.
"Do I want to know what's going to happen if I do find something?" Tim asked. Today was a day full of questions for him.
"Just let us know if you find anything. We risk being blindsided on a property as large as this school is if we don't know everything there is to know about the place," Jade said.
"Oi! Speaking of being reminded," Edmund interrupted before Tim could push Jade for more information. "You're former east coast, Tommy Boy. Any suggestions for places to eat in the Baltimore area? That's where our over-night pit stop is before we hit the job site."
A laundry list of restaurants scrolled through Tim's mind. Not only had Tony raved about several locations throughout the city, but Tony had also taken Tim to many of them on their off weekends. Tim could probably give a solid suggestion to Edmund if Edmund only clarified which kind of food he was looking for.
"Sorry," Tim began. "Never been to Baltimore."
"Pity. Oh, well. I'm sure it's the same as you asking us about food up in Green Bay. Never actually been there yet. I'll just look up some Google reviews," Edmund said. He signed the bottom of the inventory sheet and handed the clipboard to Jade. "We're all set, my lady. I'm gonna head off to back the personal luggage."
"You are released from duty, my court jester," Jade replied with just as much sarcasm.
"I'll head off to pack, as well. I'm sure Portia is trying to pack the whole apartment," Clark said. He gave Jade and Tim a wave good bye and followed Edmund out the door.
"Seriously, Jade. What am I looking for, specifically?" Tim asked as soon as they were alone.
"Anything and everything. You never know what will be relevant until you see it," Jade said. "Shannon, Kate, and the others cannot always tell me what's going to happen when we visit a job site. They don't work like that."
"Alright," Tim said. He held eye contact with Jade for a few moments to give weight to what he was saying. "But if it feels like shit is going to go down, even if you aren't told by Shannon or Kate, then trust your instincts. We have a fight or flight response for a reason."
"Don't worry, Tim. We'll all be fine. Regan is my second-in-command when we're on-site, and she knows when to override my decisions on whether or not we should stay at a location. She hasn't failed her job yet," Jade said.
"Good. Now go finish packing. I need to figure out what I'm going to do for the three weeks you all will be gone." Tim smiled and nudged Jade towards the door. He flicked the lights off and closed the door behind them.
In the dark of the equipment room, a handheld EVP monitor fell off its shelf.