180 the Polarity
180 the Polarity
The Ghostbusters had settled into a lull.
It wasn't a bad lull.
Coming on the heels of some exhaustingly busy weeks of chasing delinquent spirits, the feeling of not having to frantically pull on coveralls in the middle of boiling spaghetti [there had been an incident] was a bit like sinking into a cool leather couch on a hot day- and in fact, on this particular Tuesday, for Erin Gilbert, it felt exactly like that.
The only movement in the universe seemed to come from two sources.
A cool breeze emanated from a fan propped up on a stack of papers. It blew strands of reddish-brown hair out of the physicist's face, as she lounged on a comfy chair, which had spontaneously appeared one day on the uppermost floor of the firehouse- probably the spoils of a dumpster diving session. Across the room, the person who had no doubt procured this piece of furniture [and transported it upstairs in a shambolic operation involving Kevin and an almost-sprained ankle, which Erin was thankfully not witness to, Property damage, Holtzmann!], shimmied around a wooden workbench.
The heat slowed time to a syrupy pace, nearly stopping it altogether.
Erin registered the murmur of a tightening bolt here, the distant clang of a dropped blowtorch there, punctuating the stillness like an irregularly ticking clock. That's a nice image for Holtz, isn't it? That endearingly erratic cuckoo-clock, the little pokey one Aunt Macy owned with the sparrows on it.
She'd begun the afternoon feeling frustratingly idle. Somewhere in between opening the firehouse door that morning, and walking into the kitchen to see Abby, Patty and Kevin seated at the table watching a compilation of videos featuring cats who were impressively skilled with cutlery, Erin had realized that today was not going to be a productive day at Ghostbusters HQ. It looked like she and Abby wouldn't be working on the new book.
On the bright side, it seemed Kevin might finally have an opportunity to do his job correctly, if only for the lack of phone calls. In the past week and a half, there had been only one measly haunting - plus a case that turned out to be a man being pranked by his nephew, if that counted. Having rushed to a peak which strained the energies of the whole team, the number of ghost sightings had taken a definite down turn.
Nominally, Erin was doing paperwork, and the pile of documents on which her fan was perched would dubiously attest to this. She'd started filling out forms in avoidance of the whiteboard resting behind her- the loopy blue symbols blinking at her with the hint of a solution just inaccessible, and thus totally, infuriatingly inaccessible. Abby's urging that 'a day of watching cat videos once in a while never hurt anyone', and that they were all due a little down-time, was apparently rubbing off on her, though. 'Paperwork' had gradually morphed into an extended mid-day break.
The current decline in supernatural activity actually wasn't too unusual. In their approximate seven months of ghostbusting experience, the team learned that spectral sightings generally came and went in waves [and there was probably an interesting scientific explanation for this]. The first time it happened and the number of calls thinned, Erin had spun into a panic about the possibility of their work having 'lost its perceived legitimacy', which resulted in several (unnecessary) attempts to contact the Mayor's office to justify the continued funding of their work, and a morning spent arguing with Patty about the professionalism of the team's social media presence [the most recent picture on the Ghostbuster's Instagram account at the time featured a ghost exuberantly ecto-projecting onto Holtzmann, captioned by the engineer, 'I think she's just happy to see me ;)'].
Erin no longer let the ebb and flow of the spectral tide bother her too greatly, now that she knew there was a pattern to it.
Her stomach growled lightly, hopefully Abby and Patty would be back with their lunch soon. The air rumbled to life, almost in sympathy, as Holtzmann flicked the switch on the stereo, barely looking away from the retired containment unit she was pulling apart.
Erin's gaze slid over the scene.
The sleek high tech equipment resided in the cool basement lab, and this floor of the firehouse was instead reminiscent of the ramshackle décor of the original headquarters above Zhu's.
I could really go for some Chinese food about now.
Holtzmann's tools, and machines in various stages of repair littered the greater part of the open space. Humming along to some boom-thump-zip rhythm rolling out from the speakers, the engineer toyed around with a screw holding together the compartment she was prying open.
Absorbed in the routine task, she paused, biting her tongue as she levered open the dead unit like it was a clam shell fished from the depths. She ogled at its contents for a second, satisfied, and nodded back into motion, grabbing a pair of pliers from the wall.
The song changed, some Bruno Mars track. Yellow light glinted off a pair of wire glasses frames, as every part of Holtzmann's body that was not currently touching something potentially nuclear lazily bobbed in time with the music. She smiled broadly. Erin couldn't help but notice the way Holtz seemed to put so much of her hips into her work. A thought bubbled up about the way this trait of the engineer's might play out in other contexts, and a spike of constriction ran through her body, settling somewhere in her lower half.
Erin sighed internally, it was one of those afternoons where she was a perv, apparently.
Sometimes, thoughts seem to fall into place of their own accord, as if in a magical game of Tetris where the pieces fit together perfectly without any effort from the player.
Maybe it was the pleasing way the sun washed through the window, alighting on metal scraps and lighting up the necessary receptors in Erin's brain. Maybe she was just getting into the song playing, allowing the beat to push gates of her thoughts around. Or perhaps the way that Holtzmann dived head first into a blackened metal compartment, causing her shirt to ride up and reveal the curved flesh of her hip, caused Erin to have a mild cerebral event.
However it happened, Erin found herself in the midst of one of those moments- engulfed in the kind of lassitude that makes it effortless and instant to connect the dots with your mind. To notice the way this looks like that; to arrange the marks on the wall and spontaneously relate the fraying hem of your co-worker's oil and paint splattered shorts to the way the proton streams reacted unusually to a class V vapour you battled. To remember vividly how the beams began to unknit themselves as they brushed the spectral field.
"Hey Er, pass me the sdfjfhriu control, would'ya?"
Holtzmann called from inside the black box, where a too-many components, not enough limbs situation was happening.
Erin didn't respond.
"Hey, Hot-sdmfr, I'm all outta hands here,"
Assuming that with her face in the metal container, Erin hadn't heard her, Holtzmann tried to wiggle out of position without letting the clamp she was holding slip on the dial.
If the situation had been different, and she had seen Erin in that moment, Holtzmann would have witnessed an expression on her friend's face which conveyed an odd mix of extreme elation and indignation that ultimately read as the face of someone who had just reached the front of the washroom line.
This confusing expression was at first one of Erin calling to mind the image of all the whiteboards filled with blue symbols that had ever taunted her throughout her academic career, and then an expression of calling to mind an image of her punching those whiteboard's ugly faces. The whiteboard which she had abandoned that morning, in lieu of paperwork, stood behind her and remained nonplussed.
Holtzmann, meanwhile, had managed to extract her head from the box without the clamp moving.
"Glad you're enjoying the view n' all, buuuut until I check out this thing's pulse with that gizmo over there, I can't guarantee it won't try to fight back when I let go of this clamp- I'm thinking a lotta smoke inhalation."
As a minor part of Erin's consciousness processed this information, the larger part of it was gripped with the realization that all the problems which had been stalling her research suddenly made sense. She was having thoughts about the implications of situational polarity shifts in spectral energy fields that she'd never had before- and she would probably have to use a whole new packet of shiny blue pens to write them out.
This was shortly followed by another realization that she was staring and that Holtz was saying something. She blushed, reflexively.
Erin scrambled for the 'gizmo' and the wire cutters. Then she marched over and flipped the whiteboard on its axis. She grabbed a pen.
When Patty and Abby arrived with cheesesteaks and ice-packs, Erin was still scribbling and pacing. She appeared to be in the midst of interrogating a whiteboard, which was doing its best to look innocent. No one commented, they somehow got the impression that an interruption might be unwise.