Stuff about ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gone_byebye as he is played at <lj site="livejournal.
Apr. 7th, 2005 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynThis is only really relevant to those of you who have reason to know that, or interest in the fact that, I play Ray Stantz at the Milliways RPG community ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
milliways_bar. Admittedly some of the material is going to be reused in fic and such, but overall it's mostly pre-Milliways background foo.
As I said ingone_byebye's user info, Ray is from the continuity established by the Ghostbusters: Legion miniseries from 88 MPH comics. For him, the Gozer incident happened in October of 2003. The events of the miniseries haven't quite played themselves out for him yet; the next time he goes back to his own reality, he'll receive the phone call from issue #2 of the miniseries. (It involves someone he knew in graduate school.) The events of the second movie have not happened at all, and will not happen in his native continuum.
In Ray's world, the Twin Towers were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001 in a horrible, tragic accident. There was no terrorism involved. Instead, Trans-Ocean 66 (a jetliner from a Twilight Zone episode, that attempted to land at Idlewild and instead found itself in the age of the dinosaurs) finally managed to come home, but was so badly off course and out of control that it slammed into the tower with the radio mast. The temporal and trans-dimensional energies still surrounding the plane set off a massive surge of radio/navigational signal interference, all but wrecking navigation systems for most of the planes in the vicinity of Manhattan. One particularly unfortunate plane struck the other tower, and the towers fell. When the wreckage was combed, it was proved beyond a doubt that the first plane was the one that vanished years before. This resulted in Columbia University being willing to establish a grant for the study of parapsychology, because it was just too weird to ignore. Among all the other results, of course. But Ray's New York has no Twin Towers- and the people of Ray's US, Ray included, haven't got several years of fear and terror drilled into them.
Ray was born and raised in Mineola, Long Island. His middle name is Joseph, and his family is mostly Catholic, but he gave up on the religion thing as a teenager and hasn't looked back since. ("Do you believe in God?" "Never met him.")
Ray has a sister named Catherine, but no other siblings. He has a pair of nephews whose names elude me at the moment; one is three, the other five. He's very fond of them, but it's generally accepted in his family that the five year old will probably reach 'maturity' before Ray ever does.
As a child, Ray was exposed to very little television. His family didn't own a set until he was six, and he was only allowed an hour's TV each week for several years. This made it hard for him to link up with any of the other children at school, since he was missing most of the pop-culture references. Add in the fact that he skipped kindergarten and the fourth grade, and his time in middle school was not much fun at all. He got in some TV at his friends' houses, but by the time he started getting serious about that, it was too late.
Ray placed into high school straight out of seventh grade and was the only 11-year-old at Oratory Prep, a cut-throat competitive high school also known for its football team. The other students were not nice. In an effort to get him some kind of support network, his parents (Maria and Eddie) signed him up for a penpal club. The only kid who kept writing back after the first two or three letters was a boy named Egon Spengler.
Ray was extremely nervous about college due to his age- he'd just graduated high school at 15, after all- but found out quickly that there were plenty of people at Columbia who had also retreated into reading and comic books. This resulted in him becoming an enormous fanboy, since it was the easiest way for him to make friends with other students.
He got his education in how normal people relate to one another from someone he met on his second day of class- Peter Venkman, who wasn't particularly bothered by the age difference, since the little guy was only too happy to help with his homework in engineering. They became friends quite quickly and have been like that ever since.
Ray read everything that Charles Fort had ever written by the time he was nine years old. He wanted to become a cosmologist when he went to college, figuring that understanding the little details of the universe would grow out of understanding all the BIG details, but aside from string theory and some of the stuff about spacetime actually having eleven or nineteen or thirty-one dimensions, the actual cosmological stuff he started out studying seemed too predictable somehow. His roommate, a young man named Michael Draverhaven, picked up on Ray's dissatisfaction with his studies and started passing him books from his own collection on the occult. This struck Ray as a field begging for intellectual rigor and analysis, and permanently derailed any thoughts he might have had of going into the 'hard' sciences. He acquired a degree in electrical engineering because it seemed to be the only way he'd learn how to make the instruments he'd need to study the things that really interested him.
(And yes, Ray stayed in the dorms; in a stunning display of totally screwed-up priorities, someone at Columbia declared that it would be best for the prodigy if he would learn to assimilate with the other students, without taking into account what college is like and how it might affect someone too young to drink, drive, get a learner's permit, vote, or sign up for the military.)
His 'work in the private sector' was several summer and part-time jobs in an engineering firm belonging to a friend of his uncle Lloyd. 'They expect results' was driven home to him very firmly when he was informed that, family link or no, he wasn't going to be called back by the firm next summer if he didn't shape up right now and work on the projects they 'd hired him for instead of the stuff he was most interested in.
Ray is not much good at distrusting people. Despite Peter's attempts to instill a healthy cynicism in him, he's never entirely picked up on how to go about applying that to the people he meets. He's not stupid- he just has a hard time working out how to react to people like that, and by the time he does he's inevitably been saddled with a $4800 Cadillac hearse or a nineteen percent third mortgage.
Part of the problem is that Ray has little to no clue how to read other people's body language. This goes back to his early difficulties with socialization. He never caught up with the other kids, really. He generally doesn't realize that someone's eyes are glazing over at what he's saying until it's too late to stop- he's very sorry when this happens, most of the time, but for the most part it's too late when he figures it out.
The other side of this is that he's never figured out how to conceal his own body language, either. He's a terrible liar and a worse poker player because he can't hide his emotions properly.
Combine the two things above and Ray's had a long history of first dates, a short history of second dates, and a lot of trouble getting third dates. He tends to put non-geek women off with his enthusiasm at what most of them see as either inconsequential or overly esoteric.
His arrival at Milliways has revived his old interest in cosmology, but it's also amped up the parapsychologist in him; if this place isn't a Fortean phenomenon in and of itself, he doesn't know what is.
Ray feels horribly guilty about the time he spent in the animated Ghostbusters continuum. The only thing that protected him from being discovered was that Winston and Peter were not as perceptive there as they are in his own reality, and attributed his peculiar behavior to post-traumatic stress. Deceiving his friends, most especially Peter, went against the grain; being found out and sent back to Milliways before he had time to explain things didn't help matters any.
Ray prefers to reconcile problems instead of letting them fester, and he considers what happened in the animated continuum to be a prime act of festering.
milliways_bar. Admittedly some of the material is going to be reused in fic and such, but overall it's mostly pre-Milliways background foo.As I said in
gone_byebye's user info, Ray is from the continuity established by the Ghostbusters: Legion miniseries from 88 MPH comics. For him, the Gozer incident happened in October of 2003. The events of the miniseries haven't quite played themselves out for him yet; the next time he goes back to his own reality, he'll receive the phone call from issue #2 of the miniseries. (It involves someone he knew in graduate school.) The events of the second movie have not happened at all, and will not happen in his native continuum.In Ray's world, the Twin Towers were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001 in a horrible, tragic accident. There was no terrorism involved. Instead, Trans-Ocean 66 (a jetliner from a Twilight Zone episode, that attempted to land at Idlewild and instead found itself in the age of the dinosaurs) finally managed to come home, but was so badly off course and out of control that it slammed into the tower with the radio mast. The temporal and trans-dimensional energies still surrounding the plane set off a massive surge of radio/navigational signal interference, all but wrecking navigation systems for most of the planes in the vicinity of Manhattan. One particularly unfortunate plane struck the other tower, and the towers fell. When the wreckage was combed, it was proved beyond a doubt that the first plane was the one that vanished years before. This resulted in Columbia University being willing to establish a grant for the study of parapsychology, because it was just too weird to ignore. Among all the other results, of course. But Ray's New York has no Twin Towers- and the people of Ray's US, Ray included, haven't got several years of fear and terror drilled into them.
Ray was born and raised in Mineola, Long Island. His middle name is Joseph, and his family is mostly Catholic, but he gave up on the religion thing as a teenager and hasn't looked back since. ("Do you believe in God?" "Never met him.")
Ray has a sister named Catherine, but no other siblings. He has a pair of nephews whose names elude me at the moment; one is three, the other five. He's very fond of them, but it's generally accepted in his family that the five year old will probably reach 'maturity' before Ray ever does.
As a child, Ray was exposed to very little television. His family didn't own a set until he was six, and he was only allowed an hour's TV each week for several years. This made it hard for him to link up with any of the other children at school, since he was missing most of the pop-culture references. Add in the fact that he skipped kindergarten and the fourth grade, and his time in middle school was not much fun at all. He got in some TV at his friends' houses, but by the time he started getting serious about that, it was too late.
Ray placed into high school straight out of seventh grade and was the only 11-year-old at Oratory Prep, a cut-throat competitive high school also known for its football team. The other students were not nice. In an effort to get him some kind of support network, his parents (Maria and Eddie) signed him up for a penpal club. The only kid who kept writing back after the first two or three letters was a boy named Egon Spengler.
Ray was extremely nervous about college due to his age- he'd just graduated high school at 15, after all- but found out quickly that there were plenty of people at Columbia who had also retreated into reading and comic books. This resulted in him becoming an enormous fanboy, since it was the easiest way for him to make friends with other students.
He got his education in how normal people relate to one another from someone he met on his second day of class- Peter Venkman, who wasn't particularly bothered by the age difference, since the little guy was only too happy to help with his homework in engineering. They became friends quite quickly and have been like that ever since.
Ray read everything that Charles Fort had ever written by the time he was nine years old. He wanted to become a cosmologist when he went to college, figuring that understanding the little details of the universe would grow out of understanding all the BIG details, but aside from string theory and some of the stuff about spacetime actually having eleven or nineteen or thirty-one dimensions, the actual cosmological stuff he started out studying seemed too predictable somehow. His roommate, a young man named Michael Draverhaven, picked up on Ray's dissatisfaction with his studies and started passing him books from his own collection on the occult. This struck Ray as a field begging for intellectual rigor and analysis, and permanently derailed any thoughts he might have had of going into the 'hard' sciences. He acquired a degree in electrical engineering because it seemed to be the only way he'd learn how to make the instruments he'd need to study the things that really interested him.
(And yes, Ray stayed in the dorms; in a stunning display of totally screwed-up priorities, someone at Columbia declared that it would be best for the prodigy if he would learn to assimilate with the other students, without taking into account what college is like and how it might affect someone too young to drink, drive, get a learner's permit, vote, or sign up for the military.)
His 'work in the private sector' was several summer and part-time jobs in an engineering firm belonging to a friend of his uncle Lloyd. 'They expect results' was driven home to him very firmly when he was informed that, family link or no, he wasn't going to be called back by the firm next summer if he didn't shape up right now and work on the projects they 'd hired him for instead of the stuff he was most interested in.
Ray is not much good at distrusting people. Despite Peter's attempts to instill a healthy cynicism in him, he's never entirely picked up on how to go about applying that to the people he meets. He's not stupid- he just has a hard time working out how to react to people like that, and by the time he does he's inevitably been saddled with a $4800 Cadillac hearse or a nineteen percent third mortgage.
Part of the problem is that Ray has little to no clue how to read other people's body language. This goes back to his early difficulties with socialization. He never caught up with the other kids, really. He generally doesn't realize that someone's eyes are glazing over at what he's saying until it's too late to stop- he's very sorry when this happens, most of the time, but for the most part it's too late when he figures it out.
The other side of this is that he's never figured out how to conceal his own body language, either. He's a terrible liar and a worse poker player because he can't hide his emotions properly.
Combine the two things above and Ray's had a long history of first dates, a short history of second dates, and a lot of trouble getting third dates. He tends to put non-geek women off with his enthusiasm at what most of them see as either inconsequential or overly esoteric.
His arrival at Milliways has revived his old interest in cosmology, but it's also amped up the parapsychologist in him; if this place isn't a Fortean phenomenon in and of itself, he doesn't know what is.
Ray feels horribly guilty about the time he spent in the animated Ghostbusters continuum. The only thing that protected him from being discovered was that Winston and Peter were not as perceptive there as they are in his own reality, and attributed his peculiar behavior to post-traumatic stress. Deceiving his friends, most especially Peter, went against the grain; being found out and sent back to Milliways before he had time to explain things didn't help matters any.
Ray prefers to reconcile problems instead of letting them fester, and he considers what happened in the animated continuum to be a prime act of festering.
