(Untitled)

[gone_byebye]

It will be a positive relief to go back to Chicago and deal with the nightly near-hurricanes brought by the Robert Mackenzie's repeating manifestation. Right now Ray's about had it up to here with astonishingly perfect women. He's sort of hoping that Mary Poppins will walk through the door with a claymore slung across her back and 'There can be

Comments

[jonathanparagon]

"I need to talk to you about Andrew", Jonathan announces, arriving at his table. "Also, hi."

[gone_byebye]

Ray looks up from his cereal. "Hi, Jonathan," he says. "This is about Little Miss Wonderful, isn't it."

[jonathanparagon]

"Yeah", Jonathan confirms. "He said you've been working on it?"

[gone_byebye]

"Yeah," Ray says. "Here, have a look." He taps a few controls on his holocomputer and pops up the extended listing and write-up of all the affected individuals- including the slightly sketchier one on Andrew.

[jonathanparagon]

Jonathan gives it a look, and nods.

"I don't know where it stood when you talked to him, but he's pretty well believing that it got him now."

[gone_byebye]

"I sorta had to use the Voice to get him to think about what he was saying," Ray admits. "He'd just been identifying all the stuff that'd happened to the other people on the list, then got to his own entry and went bugnuts, and it took a little convincing to get him to think it through. If he's pretty sure of it now, though, that's the important thing."

[jonathanparagon]

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure the final straw was when I'd never heard of him having a sister."

[gone_byebye]

"That sounds about right," says Ray. "How's his head? Most of the other victims've reported some pretty terrible headaches from duplicated memories. Mine haven't been that much of a problem, but I'm sort of used to assuming a prevailing myriad-ways scenario for any given visitor from any Ghostbusters-containing universe, so that might make a difference."

[jonathanparagon]

"He didn't say anything about a headache." His frown has an edge of worry to it. "I'll keep an eye on him, though."

[gone_byebye]

Ray nods. "Thanks. In the meantime, have you heard about any other cases that aren't already on the list? It might not be a bad idea to do a sweep of all the afflicted at once so that our infiltration entity doesn't have time to gather her forces and fight back."

[jonathanparagon]

Jonathan shakes his head.

"I didn't even know anything was going on until I talked to Andrew. He wanted to know more details about a spell in our world that sounds something like this."

[gone_byebye]

"Ah, gotcha," says Ray. "What sort of spell? I'm not really up on my applied magical theory, but you never know."

[jonathanparagon]

"It's called the Paragon spell. It's not exactly like this, though - the caster stays the same person to everyone, with the same name and appearance, but their perceptions of what the person's achieved change. And there's a balance to that one - it was broken, the one time I know of it, by killing a monster it created."

[gone_byebye]

"Sort of like the portrait of Dorian Grey, then," says Ray thoughtfully. "Or Lord Voldemort's diary."

[jonathanparagon]

"Kind of", he says slowly. "But it's more like the caster making themselves the centre of everybody's world, without changing anything else... I'm not explaining it well."

[gone_byebye]

"It's all right. I can read up on it if you have any documentation that you're willing to loan out," Ray says. "If not, no big."