camwyn | Head hurt. Brain dirty.

And as long experience has taught me, when this kind of hurt is going on, the only cure is to ~~cut a hole~~sit down at a keyboard and let the evil spirits out.

Okay, so, at the moment Ray is inhabiting Ecto's body and Ecto is inhabiting Ray's. This is going to be fixed relatively soon, although Ray is going to go to Optimus Prime's world for a little bit to meet Ratchet, who's going to install some manipulator arms and get some other work done as well. Neither Ray nor Ecto is going to find out about the extra work until...

THE MAD PALAEONTOLOGIST.

The mad palaeontologist is a counter to Ivan von Stabbington. She's been working at the Museum of Natural History quietly for years now, primarily on the critters that end up in the Lila Acheson Wallace Hall of Extinct Mammals And Their Relatives. She does not gibber, she does not froth- well, not unless you ask her about the mammoths. She's not real fond of mammoths. Thinks they steal the spotlight from all the rest of the panoply of mammalian history. Anyway, the mad palaeontologist has been working at the Museum for years, and had to be evacuated from the museum when Mr. Stay-Puft turned up, since it was on Central Park West, same as Dana Barrett's building. She was a little skeeved by the supernatural at first, until she discovered that it was possible for animals to leave ghosts. After some research she found that she could use the right rituals in the right places to call up animal ghosts, and with a lot of effort plus an actual fossilized bone sample, she could call up the ghosts of even very ancient animals. She started raising the ghosts of the miniature camels in one of the displays first, to see what they looked like in the flesh, but found that their behavior was confined to one or two patterns. It's a ghost thing. Eventually she managed to work out how to raise a spirit and give it a living body. And then she realized that her high school reunion was coming up and she really never liked anybody at the school. She'll be showing up at Chelsea Piers (the reunion is on a boat) with a panoply of large dangerous mammals in her wake, probably riding on an Indracotherium. There will be hunting, there will be ghosts (she brought a few of those along just in case), and there may be quotes from Blue Oyster Cult along the way.

The mad palaeontologist will give way to the Raiders of the Lost Warehouse plot, in which the President of the United States calls the Ghostbusters and informs them that a certain Biblical artifact that had been kept at a Really Top Secret Government Warehouse has been stolen, and while they've got people on the job, they were sort of hoping the guys could help out before anybody got melted. The Warehouse itself is located in Cleveland, Ohio. (The placement decision made sense at the time, in a comedy-universe sort of way.) This is the major plot for Ray's October, because October is the hell month for him.

After the Raiders of the Lost Warehouse, the government is going to be very very thankful, because unless Raiders goes ridiculously wrong due to player action, the Feds will have been spared some thoroughly horrible consequences. The peace that follows, however, will be abruptly broken by the arrival of news from the north. In Harry Wells' world, there's a small, mostly ineffectual Canadian government agency called the Ministry of Extraordinary Threats. The Ministry dates back to a 1895 encounter between the North-West Mounted Police and an Old One (think Illyria, not Will Stanton) called Ithaqua the Wind Walker. As it happens, the Old Ones, the Great Old Ones, etc. are multi-dimensional pretty much across the board; Lovecraft started by placing many of his baddies' origins outside time and space as we know them, and they've been trying to get into 'our dimension' ever since. In a multiverse like Milliways, they've been trying to get into any 'our dimension' whenever the stars have been right. And in at least fourteen of those dimensions, the Ithaqua encounter resulted in the Canadian government taking quiet action long ago, to determine what needed to be done and make ready to do it. Most of those Ministries of Extraordinary Threats have long since been cut down to vestigial organs of government, but in one or two universes they hold more sway. Which is good, because in one of them, the Russian submarine that recently went under the polar ice cap and forced Canada to reassert its Arctic sovereignty woke up something very, very dreadful.

Earth is largely an insignificant planet on a purely ordinary cosmic scale, but it nonetheless attracts the attention of tremendous numbers of Great Old Ones and extradimensional races. It's my contention that this is because of what Wilbur Whateley discovered in The Dunwich Horror: Earth as we know it is aggregated in three dimensions around a paradimensional location of incredible power, sought after and fought over by cosmic entities from time immemorial. Wilbur Whateley spoke in his writings of the hidden city at the magnetic poles. That's the access point, which is almost impossible to open even by the most powerful of entities unless very stringent conditions apply- but perception of the so-called hidden city is possible even when full access isn't. Canada has to maintain its Arctic sovereignty because they don't trust anyone else to keep watch over the magnetic pole and prevent Things Man Was Not Meant To Know from making their attempt on the City, except maybe the Danes and the Finns. The Russians, well... historically that hasn't gone so well. Ever since Tunguska nobody's really trusted them with dimensional cross-anything.

And in one universe, the things that the Russians woke up have been very busy.

Terrible things are starting to pour out of the frozen north, and the circumpolar governments are faced with having to oppose the thousand-dimensional. Things elsewhere on the planet are starting to wake up as well. Deep-space probes are on the lookout for a wandering planet mentioned in some of the oldest papers, a rust-colored world supposedly called Ghroth, which seems to be something of a Nemesis Star. The Ministry of Extraordinary Threats is doing what it can, but what's going on is more than they can handle- and if the Inner City falls, the stars become very much right in far more places than previously possible. They're searching for as many universes as they can contact in order to put other Earths on alert while they fight their own holding action. It may be that one of the other worlds will have a way to spare the rest of the universe the horrors of their own.

None of which is known to anybody in Ray's universe until the day fourteen of the same man turn up at the United Nations with more information than anybody sane ever really wanted to know...

That last plot is more open-ended than the others, because I'd love to involve people from all kinds of fandoms and worlds and such, assuming people are interested. THe others are open for interested parties, too!