urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:not_oswald Egon Spengler, Ph. D. Egon Spengler, Ph. D. 2005-04-12T15:08:05Z urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:not_oswald:380 2005-04-12T15:08:05Z 2005-04-12T15:08:05Z New York City is not an area known in any worldline for its grasp on reality.<br /><br />Oh, its people will tell you that they, unlike the residents of the rest of their country- even the residents of the rest of their state- understand what's <i>really</i> going on, or that they alone have a true grasp of the details of day-to-day reality. They've got an attitude, and they always have. It's just that they're not entirely correct. They can't be blamed for that. The city, Manhattan specifically, sits atop one of a handful of spots scattered across the North American continent where the puncture of the walls that maintain the human race's precarious understanding of their daily 'real' existence is most possible. On some level the residents understand this, but like other human beings they have developed marvelous defenses against what would surely otherwise blow their minds and leave them gibbering in the corner. Thus it is that most of them stare blankly at outsiders who consider the events of a typical walk down Sixth Avenue weird or wondrous.<br /><br />Most. Not all. In the early decades of the twentieth century a man named Evo Shandor became all too aware of the thinning walls of reality around the city at the mouth of the Hudson, and took advantage of that fact to construct a building that would make it possible for him to bring his extra-dimensional master in. His plan wasn't properly thwarted until decades later- by another group of people, the Ghostbusters, who understood just how dangerous the New York area could be. As the only ones qualified to do so, they kept watch on that danger after.<br /><br />Of course, part of the problem with keeping watch over danger is that sooner or later, it occurs to the watcher that too much of the danger remains unknown. Something has to be done to find out more about the problem, in case it recurs again. Or so they tell themselves, anyway, since most of the time what arises is nothing more than simple curiosity, that most dangerous of human impulses. It was curiosity disguised as scientific concern that led the Ghostbusters to build a crude dimensional portal in the basement of their firehouse. Some time later, it was curiosity mingled with very real apprehension of just what might lie on the other side that led to their monitoring of the multidimensional nexus that opened onto several hundred, if not several thousand, realities. And it was <i>that</i> monitoring which led to contact with another universe where interstellar travel was a reality- in some cases, by a means as simple as walking through a properly configured doorway.<br /><br />Asking any of the Ghostbusters to ignore such a reality was like asking a dog to ignore a steak. Asking Egon Spengler to ignore such a reality when there was a person on the other side who wanted to discuss his academic work in gory detail was like asking cesium not to explode upon contact with water. The dimensional portal they'd built in the basement prior to the nexus' presence had previously only been able to touch on realities with high ambient PKE levels, but with the flood of incoming dimensional data, it was a trivial matter to reconfigure the thing for the continuum that included stargates and a Sam Carter who'd communicated with him. From there, all that remained was to bundle up copies of the schematics for most of the team's equipment, pack a bag with academic journals and monographs on the studies he'd managed to pull off over the years, and wait for clearance to open the portal and step through to the SGC.