Chapter Text
Class nine corporeal spectres with free roaming capabilities and specific tactile interaction can look and act an awful lot like living people, and therefore are awfully hard to shove into a box. Grian knows this because he’s spent the better part of ten minutes listening to Mumbo prattle on about the box he built to contain said entities.
“Class nines are tricky business,” He says. “They’re deceptive by nature; usually much more powerful than they appear. It’s not easy to force a fully tangible essence into a protonic vacuum,” He says.
“Yes I know that,” Moans Grian, a ghost hunter who isn’t entirely terrible at his job. “That’s all very well and spooky Mumbo, but what I want to know is how to put the spooky spectre into the box.”
“It’s really quite simple,” Mumbo assures. “Even you couldn’t mess it up. Hopefully.”
To demonstrate, he gestures towards the vaguely rectangular trap in front of him, sliding a lever, then flicking a switch. The box exhales a frigid puff of condensation before the top slides back to reveal the swirling proton vortex within. The air in the room tightens with static energy. A small bulb on the side flicks from green to flashing red.
“To get it open, all you do is slide the lever—that’s the safety—then flick this switch to turn it on. That’s all there is to it. Slide the lever, flick the switch. Do not push the button.”
“What happens if I push the button?” Grian asks, because of course he does. Mumbo sighs and pinches the space between his eyes.
“That reverses the vortex,” He explains. You would be pushing ghosts out of the box instead of sucking them in. Seeing how your job is to catch and contain these creeps, I would advise you to refrain from touching the button.”
“If we’re trying to catch them, why would you even make a release button in the first place? And if we do need it, why would you make the trigger something so horribly tempting as a big red button? I thought you said you had Grian-proofed this trap!”
Mumbo states perplexedly at his machine, perhaps considering how he’d managed to overlook such a key design flaw. He rubs absently at the odd shadows that circle his eyes. His face is pale. Though it always is.
“Maybe I should put some tape over it,” He mumbles, mostly to himself.
“I have a question,” Declares Scar, who is reclined haphazardly backwards on two legs of his chair. He has spent the entire meeting with his boots propped up on the desk, looking vaguely disinterested. He’s only here because Grian dragged him. Grian strongly believes that his ghost hunting assistant deserves (desperately needs) to be informed and up to date with all their gadgets and methods. Despite it being his entire job, Scar often acts like he couldn’t care less about hunting ghosts.
“How do you know your flashy bleep-bloop machines even work? Has this thing ever been properly tested?” One forearm rests casually on his thigh, while the other shoulder is slung over the back of his seat. On that hand, he’s twirling a golden coin back and forth over his knuckles. Every time it appears nearly about to drop off one side, it flips right back the other way without breaking momentum in a constant, hypnotic rhythm.
“In fairness, Scar, testing with aggressive apparitions is nearly impossible.” Mumbo fixes a pointed glare in Scar’s vague direction. Grian watches his pupils flit back and forth slightly, tracing the gliding motion of the coin. “If only we knew a high level ghost who’d be willing to volunteer.”
“If only.” Scar yawns and stretches, looking as deliberately bored as possible. He flips the coin high up in the air and catches it in his palm, barely glancing at the surface before closing his fingers around it. Grian wonders if it was heads or tails. “Too bad class nine ghosts are so dangerous that they’re impossible to catch.”
He lets his chair pound harshly back down into the wooden floorboards as he swings his legs off the desk, twisting to stand up and leave.
“But that’s the whole reason Mumbo built—Scar, have you even been listening?” Grian turns around to yell at his assistant, who is already halfway out the door. He gets up to give chase.
“This meeting isn’t over!” He cries after, both scolding Scar for walking out and whining to Mumbo for dragging it on so long. “If you want to keep this job—”
He rounds the doorway into the hall to find no one there.
Scar has a vexing habit of conveniently vanishing whenever something is needed of him. Grian has been meaning to talk to him about it for ages, but every time he’s tried, Scar is nowhere to be found.
After a minute or so of half-heartedly peering down the various hallways and junk-filled spare rooms that make up the second floor, Grian wanders back into the original office space and slumps down in his chair with a sigh. He’s dreading having to return to boring desk work even more than he dreads another lecture from Mumbo about ghost types or (blegh) science. Mumbo in the meantime has located a roll of masking tape and stuck a bit over the big red button, labeling it in bold black sharpie: G DO NOT!! It’s hard to say whether that makes it less, or more tempting.
“What do you think Mumbo, should I fire him?” Grian rocks his chair slowly back and forth, listening to the whining creak of the floorboards that comes with it. The upstairs floors of this old fire station are warped and uneven in places, squeaking obnoxiously when anyone steps on them.
“You’ll have to find him first,” Mumbo notes. He leans back to admire his handiwork on the button, removing one of his gloves to subconsciously scratch at the peeling skin on his nose. His nails are always sharp.
“Sunburnt again?” Grian says more as a statement than a question.
“Hm?” Mumbo tilts his head like he hadn’t heard, though he’s still quick to shove his hand back into the glove. Grian just shakes his head.
“For goodness sake, it’s the middle of autumn! How do you keep managing to pull this off?”
“Oh, no this is just—” He laces his fingers together. “My machines like to blow up sometimes in their beta stages. And sometimes I just can’t stop myself looking a bit too closely at a very high voltage unstable circuit. You know how I am.”
As both his employer, and friend of several years, Grian does in fact know how Mumbo is.
“Be more careful then!” He scolds. “It won’t do well for the image of our institute if my tech guy gets his face exploded.”
“Glad to hear you so concerned for my health and safety.”
The amount of sarcasm laced into that seems rather uncalled for. Grian cares plenty. He cares enough to have made plenty of accommodations around the workplace for Mumbo’s weird genetic skin sensitivity. If he truly didn’t care, he wouldn’t have bought Mumbo 100spf sunscreen for last year’s holiday exchange.
“I am.”
“Grian get down here! You’ve got a call!” Cleo’s holler buzzes through the rickety floor. Another sensible business might instead have used a pager of some sort or a more sophisticated messaging system, but the building’s walls are thin enough to have rendered that a rather impractical seeming investment.
Grian is on his feet in moments, eager for any kind of distraction other than Mumbo and his bleep-bloop boxes. The grimy pole connecting all three building levels squeaks in outrage against his clammy hands as he slides down too quick, landing roughly, yet still upright, on the ground level floor. At the front desk, Cleo is shouting placating threats into the obnoxiously mint-coloured rotary phone that receives all their incoming jobs. She yells a hurried goodbye into the transmitter as she spots the boss stumbling over, tripping over the too-tall legs of his half zipped protective suit.
“It’s that damned cat again,” She explains in a rush. “It’s tearing up the park.”
Grian groans, smacking his hand to his face. The floppy end of the unrolled canvas sleeve flops against his forehead.
This class six free-roaming exaggerated animalia ghost is no new spectacle to the company. Rather a frequent customer, in a manner of speaking. Appearing in the form of a sleek-pelted shorthair the size of a suburban family house, it routinely re-manifests around the city every few months, wreaking havoc and howling for attention in usual feline manner. Pushing cups off tables is far less cute when it scales up to pushing memorial statues off their pedestals. Dealing with this particular ghost is always a terrifying spectacle of hairballs and untrimmed claws and awful games of hide and seek—but that’s not why Grian is groaning.
Scar hates hunting ghosts, at least as far as anyone can tell. He slacks off in the office and skips whole workdays and makes a big show of wasting time whenever they get a call in every case, but one.
Scar hates hunting ghosts, but he loves this cat.
"I sense my darling Jellie is calling to me! We must make haste!" A singsongy voice rings out from above.
In a perfectly timed entrance, he twirls elegantly down the fire pole, landing soundlessly at the bottom already dressed and prepped to go. He always knows when his baby is back in town, often before anyone else.
Practically floating over with bouncing steps, he yanks Grian by the arm towards the garage where they keep that totally professional vehicle that is definitely not a former hearse. His hands are cold.
As per tradition, Grian drives, while Scar simultaneously fiddles with the sirens and DJs. He has a crappy old ipod that somehow plugs into the archaic speakers in the car. His taste in music is sometimes acceptable.
Today, he’s cranked down all the windows and dialed up the volume. “The Cat Came Back” is blasting for all the streets to hear.