ghostharasser | Open Post

[Hey, Danny's just happy to enjoy a party that isn't interrupted by ghosts, for once. Even if he does have to discreetly de-animate a zombie raccoon or two after Dipper tries to prove a point on some roadkill. One time, huh?

A week later, Danny is literally sticking his head through the wall to Dipper's room, because that's normal now.]

Hey, have you seen the remote? There's a new space documentary on in like, five minutes.

[Possibly, it was more than one time.]

[Anyway, Danny sticks his head in the wall, and Dipper looks up from where he has all his furniture pushed up against the wall and an incredibly intricate occult circle that is drown on the floor in...well, it looks like a plastic tarp and a red expo marker. Dorm rules, no drawing on the floor in blood etc etc.]

He's squatting over it holding a journal, and he has VCR at the center of the circle.]

Uh. [A pause. He looks at the VCR.]

One second.

[He tip toes his way through the circle like he's approaching a wild animal. The VCR growls at him.]

None of that, just spit it out!

[Yeah, that's gotten more normal too. Danny swears Dipper has actually started doing occult experiments like this with relish once he realized his roommate was also used to weird. Thankfully, it's usually not much of an issue, especially since Dipper keeps it to just his own room...

...although, Danny is fully willing to bring the wrath of the Infinite Realms down on anything that keeps him from seeing this documentary that he's been obsessing about for a week. So, the moment Dipper turns back to the possessed(?) VCR, said device finds itself fixed with a piercing glare from glowing green eyes filled to the brim with raw power.

You know, just for a second. As a warning.]

[The VCR reacted with a startled Yipe and horks up the remote immediately and genuinely looks rattled! For a VCR! That's crazy!]

[Dipper, a man who is so entrenched in the occult and magic, feels that insane spike of power from behind him and whips his head around with an alarmed expression.]

[And also his shadow shudders and writhes just a touch.]

Dude, what the hell was that?

What was what?

[He asks it innocently and with an easy smile, completely back to normal, but his eyes dart away from Dipper's even as he steps the rest of the way through the wall and reaches down to retrieve the remote.]

Guess it's scared of ghosts or something. Thanks, I've been looking forward to this one for ages! Also, your shadow's doing the weird thing again.

[Danny had to step lightly onto the tarp to get the remote, and he was careful enough to barely disturb it. Regardless, the circle has gone from bold red markings to black and crumbled where he stepped. Whoops, sorry man.]

[Dipper's eye dart around a second, suspiciously trying to take stock of what's around him before they fall on Danny and he raises an eyebrow. He does not stop him from retrieving the remote since, well, the VCR eating it was kind of his fault.]

[He sees how the markings have changed, though and he refrains from pointing that out too, just yet. Luckily its an easy fix with his expo marker but more importantly... That's a pretty crazy reaction to have with his circle.]

Nothing, I guess.

[He's lying, obviously. He knows it was something, he's not stupid. Danny wants this ruse for whatever reason, though. He'll play along for now.]

Enjoy your show. I- [His eyes snap to his shadow with a glare.] knock it off!

[Stomps on his shadow a bit in righteous indignation like that's not an incredibly unhinged thing to just do. It's fine, Danny knows he's weird.]

[Danny just chuckles and leaves Dipper to it, phasing back through the wall and settling down on the couch with a soda as the documentary starts. He'll be completely zoned out watching that for the hour or so that it runs...

...which gives Dipper some time to Investigate, perhaps.]

[He's gotta deal with the VCR first, which is cursed as it turns out, less possessed. It was down in the AV room biting students so he wrapped it up and took it home. He had it in the livingroom eventually which is how it ate the remote but he quickly moved it into his room when he knew Danny would be home soon.]

[Luckily the curse wasn't hard to break, and it goes back to being a normal VCR. He does wonder who did it, though...weird.]

[Anyway, once that's done and he starts cleaning up, he will pull out a little device and start doing readings on his room for ecto-plasm. He has a theory....]

[Needless to say, there is ectoplasm. It's most concentrated in the areas where Danny had just been, especially the wall he'd initially phased through, where Dipper had felt that power spike from.

But if Dipper has scanned for ecto before, like say shortly after Danny told him about being "ecto-contaminated?"

There's more of it. Everywhere. Higher concentrations of ambient ectoplasm, something the living world doesn't even normally have at all unless something is fucky, like an open portal to the Ghost Zone. It hasn't even been that long, but the stuff's been gathering.]

[Well then. Concerning.]

[Maybe it's time to do a little external research on Amity Park. He has a laptop, obviously, because he's in school and needs one but time to do a little hunting around abut Amity Park and it's residents. What can he get his hands on?]

[Dipper will easily turn up a number of small social media accounts belonging to current or former Amity Park residents. It'll take some digging back in time through most of them to turn up anything about ghosts, but sure enough, once you go back about three years there is SO much talk about ghost attacks.

And it's consistent.

Some names and descriptions come up multiple times. "Skulker." "Technus." "That robot hunter guy." "The crazy tech ghost." But there's one that stands above the rest -

"Phantom."

Photos, when there are any, are blurry and janky. Phantom has a black and white and sometimes ecto-green theme going on, that much is clear, but surviving photos of him don't have a clear look at his features. (There's a suspicious number of photos that appear to have been deleted, however...) The discussion on this particular ghost seems to consist of a) a fanclub swooning over him, or b) various people arguing over whether he's a menace or a hero.

There's a large number of deleted comments from one "WWeston" that are consistently replied to with annoyed skepticism. Occasionally, the replies will have been deleted as well.

And, strangely... not a whole lot of talk about ecto-contamination itself. Certainly there's some chatter about how crazy the Fentons are and whether their inventions even work, but Dipper might only see a small handful of posts along the lines of people noticing someone's eyes glowing slightly, or photos someone posted of their sharper than normal canine teeth. Followed by one or two people assuring them that's just normal in Amity Park now.]

[This is all very fascinating. Dipper does do individual searches for each of these named ghosts, and tries to find as much individual information as possible. A picture of Skulker strikes him as strangely familiar but he isn't sure where or how.]

[WWeston, though. He wonders if that brings up any kind social media he can contact. Maybe an Instagrab or FaceNook account.]

[The Flitter account Dipper originally found hasn't updated in years - but it sure does have links to an empty Instagrab on its profile, and through that a FaceNook that still looks active.

Wes Weston, huh. Apparently he's also currently attending college - journalism major, looks like - albeit much closer to Amity Park itself, still in the same state. At a glance, the posts all look pretty normal. Of course... less normal conversations wouldn't be left out in the open by anyone with half a brain cell.

There are plenty of photos - something the guy is really into, it seems, and he's a pretty damn good shot too. Some of the landscape shots are downright gorgeous. It's easy enough to identify Wes, a guy with grungy red hair and a goatee, tall and lean and sharp eyed.

Maybe a little too sharp eyed. As Dipper comes across some shots of Wes in dimmer light, he might notice there's a hint of a glow in those eyes, bringing them from a fairly normal mossy green to more of a gleaming seaglass green where they catch the light. Not ecto green, quite, but definitely not normal either.]

[Interesting, interesting. Dipper can appreciate a love of photography. Probably it would have been something he’d gone into had he not been such a math-nerd. Either way, he …]

[He spends about thirty minutes recovering his FaceNook account because he logs into it once a year at best, but after that he shoots the guy a DM. A quick introduction to who he is, that he was interested in writing a paper on Amity Park, and was reaching out to some people who lived there for information.]

[There, if he hears nothing back, he’ll shrug it off. If he gets a response, he will see what he can learn!]

[He gets a DM back within half an hour, which is startlingly fast. Especially considering that it reads...]

Bullshit. You haven't reached out to anyone but me and haven't logged into your account in over a year. You're lucky you appear to be a real person, or I would have just blocked you. I do, however, see that you attend the same school as Fenton, so. What is this really about, Mason Pines?

[Wow, damn, okay. They're cooking with gas, after all. Dipper can't even be offended by the response because it means this guy really IS a lead that he might get some useful info out of, and probably isn't going to yank his chain.]

Okay, first off, I know using my real name was to drive a point home but it's Dipper, and you've got me. Color me impressed!

I have concerns about ecto-contamination and I've been told some interesting details about Amity Park by my roomate. Only, I'm pretty sure he's not being totally honest about everything, so I'm just here to make sure nothing crazy is about to happen on campus.

If you're as good as you seem, I'm sure you've already done research on me and my family, yeah? I have reasons to be worried.

Bingo. You've got a point, but if I were you, I'd give up hoping for "nothing crazy."

Your device does video?

[HMM. A suspicion he had that he isn't super happy to be correct about but, let's try and learn more, then.]

Yep, one sec. Gotta sound proof the room first. My roomate should be pretty occupied in the other room.

[About ten minutes later, another DM]

Ready.

[As soon as Dipper gives the okay, he receives a DM with nothing but a link. It's not to any video call service he'll recognize - something privately owned? The domain name is "toofine." Huh.

But, sure enough, should he click it it'll open up a video call in as professional a quality as any big name. The video pops open to Wes sitting at a desk in a dim room, not much behind him visible. Yep, the eyeglow is here too, if you know to look for it. He seems to give Dipper a once over, then nods.]

All right, you pass. You're really that kid from all those Gravity Falls newspaper articles that get passed around on paranormal sites, huh? What exactly did you wanna know about ecto contamination?

[It's like a mutual once over, honestly. Like two weird birds sizing each other up.]

[Anyway Wes will also see that behind Dipper, his room is still kind of in disarray from his VCR exorcism, but there's plenty in the room that give way that Dipper is just as much up to the same kind of stuff as he was in all those newspapers. There's a series of magic symbols tapped across the way. His sound proofing!]

Well, you've told me something interesting without meaning to, in that you mentioned my roomate by name before I even volunteered much aside from wanting to look into Amity Park, so that already tells me he's downplaying or obfuscating what he's told me.

He made a point to say that town wide ecto-contamination was a big deal and a lot of the people there have really worrisome side effects as a result. Lots of people with funny ghost-like abilities.

If that were true, I think the level of contamination would stay mostly consistent around the dorms but I just did a reading and it skyrocketed almost overnight. I'm starting to think something big might be about to happen and I'd like to be prepared for it.

So it IS Fenton. I fucking knew it.

[Wes smacks his fist into his desk, turning and standing up from his chair as he drags a hand through his hair. He continues talking as he goes over to the far side of his room, slightly out of frame - his mic was a small wireless one clipped to the collar of his flannel shirt.]

The contamination is a thing, yeah. Most of us just have glowy eyes or slightly pointy ears or something though. Fenton is a whole other can of ghost worms.

[He's now pulling something into the frame that Dipper will probably immediately recognize as a corkboard or some other type of display on wheels. There's a sheet draped over it.]

BUT, that guy's already gotten enough grief from me, so there's things I'm not gonna tell you either. No idea about your extra ecto anyway - I'm a journalist, not an ecto-scientist. What I can tell you?

[Wes tugs the sheet off, revealing a corkboard STUFFED with photos, articles, post it notes, and loads and loads of multicolored strings. He leans down to grin into the camera as he snaps a telescoping pointer out to its full length.]

How's a brief history of Amity Park's ghost attacks sound?

[Yeah that. Is NOT going to be brief.]

That's pretty consistent with what I read about Amity Park, so I thought the vast discrepancy in Danny's story was awfully suspicious. I'll give it to him, the man's one of the worst liars I've ever encountered. I bet he's awful at poker.

[Note to self, play poker with Danny and see how much he can win off of him.]

[Anyway when Wes gets up and just has a full ass corkboard ready to show, Dipper sits up in his chair and leans forward like someone showed him the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.]

Dude, are you kidding? You've got me for- uh.

[He checks his watch.]

Approximately 45 minutes, which is when his Space Documentary ends.

[Anyway, he's got his pen out and the journal is on the table. Give him all the deets!!!]

[Wes snorts at Dipper's comment about Danny's terrible attempts to lie.]

Man, you don't know the half of it.

...I can do 45 minutes.

[Dipper's excitement is infectious and Wes can only grin wider. A timeframe is perfect, and if it's some dumb show about space, he knows for a fact Danny will be glued to it until the end of the credits. So he launches right into it.

Dipper is treated to an enthusiastic and often first-hand account of almost everything - how ghosts began appearing when the Fentons got their portal working, the appearance of Phantom, all of the major conflicts that took place in town. Wes speaks of Phantom with both annoyance and begrudging appreciation, and he clearly doesn't have the whole story on several incidents, but Danny's two best friends seem awfully involved a lot of the time. Past the first year or so Wes gets slightly more vague on the accounts, but notes that from that point ghost attacks began to wane as Phantom established his territory and strength. By the end of what would have been Danny's senior year in high school, there were barely any, and some of the regular troublemakers had become more like local minor celebrities when they showed up. (Well, Ember McLain is decidedly less minor of a celebrity, but still.) Additionally, both Danny's parents and the other local ghost hunter, the Red Huntress, had stopped hunting ghosts indiscriminately and instead begun working towards less violent types of research and even cooperation.

However you slice it, it's obvious enough that Amity Park must in fact be highly saturated in ectoplasm. That portal was either just left open or prone to opening on its own far too often, to say nothing of the incident where an evil Ghost King pulled the entire town into the Ghost Zone. Like, no wonder this dude's eyes glow. The question, of course, remains about Danny - who Wes neglected to mention slightly too often, perhaps.]

[And Dipper to his credit, listens with rapt attention, pausing only to take notes here and there, clarify a detail, poke a bit at something that seems left vague on purpose to see if Wes will give him a little more, and then of course, to check the time.]

[But it's all really interesting information. He keeps a tree of important names, he does a few sketches if some of the photos that he's able to make out. He thinks by the end of it, Dipper has a pretty good scope of the picture minus of course ...one thing.]

[He has noticed Danny's lack of mention despite this entire thing seemingly centered around him. That tells him more than Wes might realize. It tells him that there is a lot that lots of people aren't willing to tell him, and thus makes the Danny Situation all the more curious. He also picks up on something else.]

[That tone that Wes talks about Phantom is pretty close to how he talks about Danny. Hmhmhm.]

[Dipper's alarm goes off, and he pauses to look back towards his bedroom door.]

--Okay, I think we should wrap this up, but you've given me a ton to work with. Whatever's gearing up to happen, I can at least start making plans.

[He shuts his journal.]

I owe you big time so hit me up if you ever need anything weird dealt with that isn't Amity Park flavored.

Huh. I'll hold you to that.

[No need to exchange further contact info - if Wes can do anything, it's find someone. Especially someone whose IP address has now been logged on Foley's network.]

Thanks for letting me ramble about an old passion; hope it helps whatever nonsense Fenton manages to attract. Oh, and... hit me back up if you figure anything out, all right?

[Wes's satisfied smirk widens to a conspiratorial grin as he winks at the camera, and then the feed cuts.

Well then.

Meanwhile, the credits of the documentary have just finished, and if Dipper's soundproofing only works one way he'll be able to hear his roommate getting up and wandering into the kitchen to rummage through the fridge.]

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