"Oh, god," Patty moaned after seeing the corpse of Martin Heiss on the ground.
"Erin, what have you done?" Abby's voice was so low, so soft, and completely unlike her normal tone. "What were you thinking?"
To her side, right behind her, Erin was looking at the crumpled corpse of Dr Martin Heiss, a famed debunker of the paranormal on the ground in shock and disbelief. "I-I didn't know it would do that-," she said in a very small voice. "I just wanted to show him the ghost."
"The same ghost that we chased around a rave," Patty reminded her.
"You shouldn't have opened the damn thing in the first place!" Abby snapped, glaring at her old friend in irritation, wondering why Erin simply didn't get it; oh, Abby was all for scientific study and research, but the ghosts were unpredictable and they were capable of all kinds of things, and they could pass through walls. Their new traps were designed painstakingly to keep the ghosts contained and trapped indefinitely. "How would we get it back into the trap? 'Oh, excuse me Mr Ghost Goblin,'" Abby said sarcastically, "' Would you please get back inside the trap?'"
Erin slammed her eyes shut, already feeling them sparkle with tears. She already felt like shit right now because of her reckless move, and now they could all be arrested for murder, after the high of catching their first ghost and trapping it successfully thanks to Holtz's invention. They'd had a fight and a half getting the fucking thing trapped in the first place. It had torn through a rave, and heaven alone only knew what it could have done to Patty.
So what was going through her head when she had released the ghost from the trap?
Erin had been humiliated for her interest in and belief that ghosts were real for years. She had jumped at the chance to write the book she and Abby had spent so long painstakingly researching, only to be humiliated at the end. She'd gotten cold feet and disowned the whole project, walked away from Abby and ignoring her and pretending her best friend who'd believed her completely at school didn't exist. She had spent years ass-kissing and simpering up to people to get a highly desired job, only for it to go down the drain despite the video Abby, Holtz and her recorded after they visited the Aldbridge Mansion; even now she couldn't understand why everyone assumed their video was a hoax when there was so much proof it wasn't.
But the confrontation with Heiss was the last straw.
Erin knew precisely why she had opened the trap. She'd had enough. She had had enough of people like Heiss sneering at her and her friends, calling them liars and frauds for what they did, and when he had challenged her, she'd snapped.
"I get it, Abby," Erin looked close to tears.
Abby glared at her friend. This was typical Erin. She was good at preaching the desire for academic vindication, but she did make really stupid mistakes. She sighed and tried to let go of her anger, it wouldn't do much good right now since they would be forced to answer for this mess.
Truth be told….Abby had an excellent idea of what had made her old friend open the trap, and she had a good idea Holtz and Patty did too; she had told Holtz about the good times she'd shared with Erin, and after hearing the story of how Erin had seen a ghost as a little girl, only to be mocked and bullied for it to the point everyone called her names, and her parents refused to believe her, Abby knew Patty did too, which explained the sympathetic look Patty sent Erin's way.
Abby felt the same way. She wanted to be vindicated. She wanted to show ghosts off to the world. She wanted to show ghosts to all of those who'd mocked her for years and watch their smug faces go slack. But she had known Holtz was going to spend time and energy designing and building a special containment device for that. Holtz was a scientist herself, she might be borderline crazy, but she did take science extremely seriously, and Abby knew that she had a fascination with the ghosts herself, and she had been shaping and updating their technology ever since.
Working on a way to trap the ghost and studying it closely in controlled lab conditions was exactly the sort of thing she would be working on, and knowing Holtz as Abby did, there was little doubt she was doing it long before they had gone out to capture the ghost to begin with.
"Erin, we didn't owe him anything. Okay, I understand your desire to be vindicated, I do too, but releasing ghosts is not going to do it. How would we study them from there?" Abby asked, looking at her friend sympathetically.
Erin looked shamefacedly down, looking as if the world was crumbling under her feet. "I wasn't thinking, okay, Abby? I've spent years trying to bury the fact I researched ghosts to get away from the ridicule we'd gone through. I just wanted to wipe the smug arrogant look off of Heiss's face."
"We understand that, Erin," Jillian sighed, "and I was designing a special containment vessel we could release ghosts into for study and research; it would have had the same basic tech as a trap. All we needed to do was to be patient."
"I didn't know."
"I know," Holtz sighed and stuck her head out of the window. The body had been found and people were already looking up at their window and putting two and two together to make sixteen. "There's nothing we can do. And we can't cover this up. Let's just hope the cops understand it was an accident."
"I bet they don't, but you're right, there's no way we can walk away from this," Patty sighed.
The group sighed as one. In the distance, they could already hear the cops coming. The Ghostbusters left their - temporary - HQ and went out to meet them. This was not going to be good.