InsaneJournal

What: Ghostbusting
When/Where: Halloween afternoon to sundown, the Tower
Notes: complete, no warnings, info under the cut.

1. If you'd like to have your character make an appearance in the log, please email me! ~G 📧


2. Objective: Team Science has built a Faraday Cage in a supply closet in one of the R&D labs. Use proton packs or magic to rodeo the ghost into it!


3. If this gets no movement by Saturday morning (No tags by Sat afternoon) I'll finish the plot with a writing partner to close this out.

Finally, everything was set up and ready to go. There were people stationed on the lower floors, acting as lookouts or to chase the ghost back up to the floor above. Up top, in Tony's lab, Team Science had already built a Faraday Cage-like device into a supply closet. It wasn't much to look at, but aesthetics didn't matter at this point. Holding a poltergeist for as long as possible was what they were aiming for. All they needed to do was try to push a ghost to the top floor and lasso it in, and Friday would shut the door.

Meanwhile, the resident magic users were warding their allocated spaces to keep the ghost to the upper floors, and other people were monitoring the floors below in case it tried to escape their trap. Volunteers from Team Science were on the upper floors. Everyone was outfitted with ghost hunting equipment and proton packs, courtesy of Jane's love of Radioshacking equipment. She always wanted to build them, and between her, Hope, and Tony, they were able to create a contraption that seemed to work. After some quick tests, it easily interrupted the flow of several types of electricity with a somewhat aim-able plume of pure proton power.

Being accustomed to rushing into planning and fixing stages, Tony didn't stop too often to realize how weird his life was. As he donned a proton pack that Team Science threw together, he stopped and uttered a soft 'huh' sound, as though the full unfiltered weird finally found a foothold.

"Locked and loaded," he told Friday, and everyone over the comm. There was only one way to tell if this was going to work, and that was to wait for some sign of the ghost.

A soft ping announced the arrival of the elevator to the top floor. When the doors opened to reveal no one inside, Tony realized he didn't have to wait long. His head twitched forward just enough that the sunglasses slipped from the top of his head to over his eyes. The glasses turned on automatically, and a couple quick blinks rendered everything in hues of warm yellows and oranges transitioning into cool blues. The entire elevator was a dark blue inside as the doors slid open, and his hands tightened on the 'gun' of the device as he waited for something to happen. It was always possible that the ghost ripped an iced cold fart in the elevator and pressed the button before it bailed out.

It looked like he was the first one to try to roll the troll.

"It's heeeeeerrrree," he said in a creepy little voice. He coughed once and amended, "Maybe. It likes trolling me, so this could be a sick joke."

A blast of cold air moved through him so suddenly, chilling him to the bone, that Tony's finger slipped off the trigger as he flailed.

The entire room grew cold, a rolling office chair began to move before lifting off the ground. It flew into the Javabot, shattering the clear pneumatic tubes, spilling the beans all over again.

"It's definitely here!" Tony yelled, shooting a blindingly bright beam of energy toward the wounded Javabot. For anyone watching or listening over the security feed, a long stream of bleeeeeep could be heard, along with a few "you"s thrown in.

“I’ve got you!” That was Hope’s response as she joined Tony, locked and loaded with her own equipment - the proton packs hadn’t taken too long to build because, as she told Jane, they were basically comprised of particle accelerators with a specific energy outputs through the wands (no comments from the peanut gallery). The electromagnetic fields propelled charged particles, and that was how you made the beams.

The beams which shot out when she pulled the trigger, a squint of one springtime green eye - she had experience with firearms, she’d been to a few shooting ranges in her day, so her aim was pretty good. A shame the Javabot had been a casualty of war again, but that was just a thing. It could be fixed.

People really couldn’t be.

She must have made contact with something, because beakers and pipettes and graduated cylinders flew off more shelves in a rage, and she had to keep her focus on where she was aiming rather than the cold that reached into her bones.

“Is everything alright over there?” Wanda asked over her comm device, hand touching her ear briefly. She was wandering between rooms (albeit slowly), setting up protective wards and fortifying them with salt. Salt, blood, bone, promise - these were the cornerstones of her magic, what she was beginning to understand. And what she knew at least one twin would be proficient with - it was just a feeling she had, deep down, the way many mothers-to-be just knew things.

She wanted to be useful while the poltergeist ravaged the tower, and if these protective barriers aided in herding the apparition to its final destination, then so be it. “We’ve got things warded down here. The...being shouldn’t be able to cross.”

Down on a lower floor, Loki was draped over a desk. One arm rested over his eyes, a healing cut in plain view over the palm of his hand, a wound that would be fully healed by the next morning.

The type of magic used was of the old ways, before sorceresses and healers perfected spellcrafting into what he considered a fine artform. It was primitive, sigils and rudimentary runes painted with blood and ash, stitched together with gossamer threads of seidr. He was careful to mark every entry point and weave enough magic into it so the 'ink' was invisible. The ghost couldn't pass to the floors below and it wouldn't cause the Starks' employees a bout of squeamishness.

It was a taxing effort, but some tiny, infinitesimal part of himself felt like he should be making amends after that debacle with the Chitauri. The larger part of himself said not so much, since he wasn't exactly himself again until the big green brute knocked some sense into him again.

"It will not," he said over the comm, agreeing with Wanda and managing to keep any traces of weariness from his voice. "The floors are warded, unless it finds some miraculous way to sneak to the floors, below. The rest is best left to you."

The magic duo sounded self assured, and Tony wasn't about to debate them. The founts of pure energy were pouring forth as they tried to coax the spirit through the open door of a supply closet. It was a bare blip through the visual display, the faintest of shadows flickering amid the almost blinding beams.

Finally, Tony saw the trace of the shadow merging with the dark of the room, the light inside flickering on as he called out, "Friday, close the door!"

Like most of the things in the lab, for ease of use when carrying equipment, the doors were automated. They slid open and closed on demand. As the light inside registered the presence of anomalous energy, he cut the power to the proton pack as the door slid shut, leaving only burnt smudge across the surface. The energy sink of the Faraday Cage took care of the rest.

The ghost wailed within, a muffled shriek that could be heard floors below, enough to make the blood run cold. A series of thumps and thuds could be heard against the walls and door.

Tony was uncharacteristically quiet, pushing the sunglasses up to the top of his head. He looked at Hope with a glimmer of optimism, raising his eyebrows slightly. There would be time to mourn Javabot later. So far, this looked like a momentary win for science & technology.

"Ghost jail works," he said, flashing a sudden smile. "Thanks for the backup."

“Hey, no problem,” Hope chuckled, her ponytail bouncing with a nod. She powered down her blaster wand, her proton pack shutting off for the time being. “I mean, what were we supposed to let it do, just destroy our coffee supply forever?” And that just couldn’t happen. They had things to science, and they needed fuel to do it - caffeine was their fuel, don’t judge them.

Now the question just had to be asked, because Hope was curious. “Where is it going to go from here?” The ghost, that is. The way it shrieked gave her a distinctive ‘nails dragging down a blackboard’ feeling, but she still wanted it to pass safely over to...the afterlife. Or wherever it was angry ghosts happened were supposed to be.

The smell of singed metal and ozone hung in the air, and Tony gave a sniff at it while staring at the closet door. A thud against it made the whole door shake, and yet it held firm. Whatever energies or emotions it fed on, it was cut off from them, and sooner or later? Energy like that had to run out.

For a brief moment, that sarcastic part of his brain thought of Trapped In The Closet. Then the urge to scrub the inside of his skull out with some Clorox and S.O.S. steel soap pads set in. Tony visibly shuddered while making a Mr. Yuck face, and not because of the ghost screeching away in there.

"Dunno," he said. "I'll text the doc and...."

The air was suddenly making a sizzling noise behind them as Dr. Strange stepped through, finishing off that statement with, "...have me deal with it."

The sorcerer walked past them, cape flowing like water in his wake and a ritualistic brass dagger floating along side as he strode toward the closet. He paused before opening the door, weaving a fiery sigil that hovered the air with the barest motion of his hands.

"Or you know, he could just show up finally," Tony joked to Hope, looking and sounding relieved that this hot mess was about to get solved.

And solved it was. The sorcerer was too set on the task at hand to acknowledge any quips about his mysterious whereabouts. The door was opened and he flew in quickly, along with the phurba. A blinding fiery light flashed inside as a muffled chanting could be heard, followed by unintelligible whispers traded back and forth between the living and the dead. And then?

Silence.

Not the blessed sort. It was the uncomfortable silence where one could hear their own racing heart beating, or each other's inhale or exhale as they breathed.

The door slowly opened and faintly glowing orange steam poured out, along with the faint aroma of sulfur. The doctor walked out from the cloud, the spirit dagger disappearing into a pocket dimension from where it was hovering in the palm of his hand.

"It's gone," he announced, loud enough that everyone over the comms could probably hear it. "And that closet's going to need fumigated."

It didn't seem like Strange was being evasive, since he wasn't shying away from meeting anyone's gaze, or twitchy at all. But to Tony, it didn't seem like he was divulging what was said in the closet, or that he wanted to stick around for chit chat regarding why he was gone.

"...so that's it?" Tony said, the rise in pitch proving just how exasperated he was getting.

"It's gone," Stephen sternly reiterated as he walked past, the cape flapping up like it was waving toodle-loo to both mad scientists. He headed toward the waiting portal with a steady gait, not faltering a single step. "I moved it onward, even if it was reluctant. There are ghosts all over New York. Some of them are as unstable as the living, mentally speaking. Including that one."

The doctor turned and looked at them both once he was on the other side of the portal. The smirk he gave them was mirthless. "I still have to unpack. Happy Halloween."

The portal closed in on itself, leaving them in a trashed lab with a ruined coffee machine.

"...unbelievable," Tony grumbled under his breath to Hope, taking off the pack and set it aside on a rickety workbench. "I relinquish my asshole lifetime achievement award to that guy. Game over."

When he spoke over the comm, he told everyone, "Anyway, yay! Good work everyone? Ghost's gone. Thanks for helping out! Pep and I are gotta take Morgan trick or treating, dressed up like Ironthorcaptahulk. Childhood diabetes doesn't kick-start itself. Candy's in the lobby if anybody wants some? Happy Halloween!"

Inwardly, he was grateful but irked. Even if Strange saved them from the 'what next' portion of troubleshooting, Tony knew exactly what he was itching to bust an iron fist on: Dr. Strange's face.