Chapter Seven: Busters & Burgers, Demons & Ducks

 

Chapter Seven: Busters & Burgers, Demons & Ducks

            Shadowhunters.

            A special kind of demon-hunters, born with angel blood, maintaining their own culture and civilization within human society throughout centuries. Simultaneously, they’ve kept the Shadow World a secret from the world of “mundanes” (their word for humans), protecting both. Their angelic blood gifted them with abilities beyond human capacity through the application of runes.

            Not even the Ghostbusters or the M.I.B. knew of their existence (and they preferred to keep it that way).

            Three specific Shadowhunters were staking out on the corner of Ocean Avenue in the Brooklyn district – Jace and the Lightwood siblings, Alec and Isabelle (“Izzy” for short). They stood across the street from Bob’s Burgers, a hamburger joint owned and operated by Bob Belcher and his family.

            They waited hours for Scrooge McDuck to arrive.

            “I can’t believe you have Scrooge McDuck in your contacts,” the amused Isabelle said to Jace.

            It wasn’t exactly something Jace wanted to flaunt over. He wasn’t the flaunting type. “Yeah, well, he’s a Shadowhunter legend,” he told Izzy. “After that mess with Magica De Spell and the Shadow World, wouldn’t you want to have him in your contacts?”

            Isabelle shrugged with a flirtatious smile. “I’m more partial to having Launchpad’s number in mine.”

            “Hey, you kids!” the angry voice of a middle-aged man griped at them.

            It was Jimmy Pesto, the owner of the pizza restaurant that they were staked out in front of. “You kids can’t just loiter outside my business, unless you plan on orderin’ here,” he told the Shadowhunters. “Either you order in the next few minutes or I’m callin’ the cops!” He stepped back inside his establishment, shortly after giving his stern warning.

            Alec didn’t necessarily appreciate Pesto’s hostile tone any more than he did over being noticed. “I thought you had us glamoured the second we got here,” he scolded to his sister.

            “My mistake,” Izzy scathingly remarked, prior to taking out her stele (a tool used by Shadowhunters to draw runes into their skins, weapons, and other materials) and hovered it over the one rune marked on her right forearm. It lit in correspondence with similar runes drawn on Jace and Alec, both of them sensing a slight burning sensation.

            Within seconds, they were placed under the “glamour,” an invisibility spell that kept them cloaked from the eyes of mundanes like Jimmy Pesto (unless the pizza shop owner was born with the Sight, enabling him to see through their cloak).

            Now that they were glamoured, Alec continued their conversation without interruption. “Have you been able to reach Clary?” he asked Jace.

            “No,” Jace replied, visibly frustrated. “I’ve been trying all night, but she keeps sending me to voicemail. She doesn’t think I trust her with this ‘plan’ of hers.”

            “Do you?” Isabelle inquired.

            “Of course I do,” Jace didn’t hesitate to say. “But joining with the Ghostbusters? What kind of plan is that? They’re a bunch of crazy mundanes who don’t know what they’re doing.”

            “That makes them capable,” Isabelle approved.

            “That makes them dangerous,” Jace countered. “And I don’t like that Clary thinks they can be any help in dealing with the new threat we’re facing from the Shadow World.” He glanced at his phone, which he did every few seconds, hoping for Clary to call him back. Ever since the current situation in Gravity Falls broke out, his desperation to reach her swelled.

            “Just trust her, Jace, like you always have,” Isabelle suggested. “Believe that she and the Ghostbusters are already on solving the problem happening in Oregon.”

            “Izzy’s right,” Alec vouched. “I’m not saying the Ghostbusters are necessarily dependable, but they have dealt with world-ending threats like these almost as much as we have. Clary’s with the right people for the job.”

            Jace could only accept the word of his parabatai (his lifelong, soul-bound partner). “I just wish she could tell me that herself.”

            “He’s here,” Izzy notified, drawing Jace and Alec’s attention to a limousine that pulled up in front of Bob’s Burgers. Its driver was none other than Launchpad McQuack, much to Izzy’s seductive pleasure. The ditzy chauffer (and other times pilot) was instructed by the richest duck in the world to stay parked outside, assuring him that they wouldn’t be inside the restaurant for too long.

            “They,” of course, being Scrooge himself and his three nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie), as well as Webby Vanderquack. The Shadowhunters hadn’t quite anticipated McDuck on bringing the children with them.

            “This will complicate things,” Alec asserted.

            “No more than that will,” a dismayed Jace said, pointing to another vehicle that parked behind Scrooge’s limo. It was a white 2008 Volvo V70 retrofitted to be the Ectomobile of the B-Team Ghostbusters, brandishing their company logo on both the driver and passenger side doors. Dr. Lisa Stevens was behind the wheel, accompanied by Leidy Stantz (sister of Dr. J.G. Stantz), Meagan Tully, and Miguel Rivera (the 12-year-old cousin of Leidy and J.G., as well as a Junior Ghostbuster recruit).

            Alec wasn’t any more pleased to see them than Jace. “What are they doing here?!”

            “I don’t know,” Jace moaned. “But this night is about to get even crazier.”

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            Bob Belcher was in the kitchen, grilling away, when he heard his wife shout out from the dining area in her usual energetic, Boston-accented voice, “Bobby! Get in here!” He thought it to be an emergency from the extra bit of spontaneity she summoned him with, so he carefully abandoned his grilling duties and headed into the adjacent room.

            “What is it, Linda?” he asked his wife. He found her pointing to the restaurant entrance, her face overwhelmed with a mix of shock and excitement. Their three children – Tina, Gene, and Louise – had the same expressions, looking towards the same place Linda was.

            Bob only realized why his family was so enthralled when he spotted Scrooge McDuck and the Ghostbusters. “Oh, wow,” he muttered, now caught in the same mix of shock and excitement…for Scrooge, at least. In seeing the Ghostbusters, he became a little worried. “You’re not here to bill us, are you?”

            Lisa Stevens looked on Bob in confusion. “Why would we bill you?”

            “Because, a month ago, our next door neighbor Mort called you guys to look into his funeral home, and he says you billed him $30,000 just to stand in a room for two hours,” Bob explained.

            “Say what?!” Scrooge exclaimed. Having recently started funding the Ghostbusters’ enterprise, he had more than enough reason to be so surprised and even a little infuriated from Bob’s report.

            I’m gonna kill Venkman when I see her, Lisa thought as she nervously turned to Scrooge and did damage control. “It was a dumb business transaction that Natalie tried only once.”

            McDuck wasn’t all that convinced of this, and he almost demanded a further explanation until he was interrupted by the dinging of the restaurant entrance. All eyes centered on it, noticing how it swung open and then closed all on its own with no one coming in or out of it, much to everyone’s bewilderment.

            “Did we get an automatic door installed?” Bob questioned.

            “I dunno,” Linda nonchalantly shrugged.

            “It’s a ghost!” the bunny-eared Louise (the youngest of Bob and Linda’s three children) bellowed. She then urged to Lisa, Leidy, Meagan, and Miguel (who were already seated at the counter), “Get off your butts and do your job!”

            “Louise!” Linda scolded her daughter. “Be nice to our customers.”

            “Mom, we got a ghost problem – we’re their customers!” Louise retorted.

            His anxiety rising, Bob almost pleaded to Dr. Stevens, “Please tell me there isn’t a ghost in our restaurant. My checkbook can’t handle the expenses right now.”

            “Don’t listen to him!” Louise belayed. “Money is no object!”

            “Yes, yes, it is,” Bob refuted. “It’s an object. A very important object – one that pays our bills, utilities, and college tuition!”

            To put the increasingly alarmed Belcher family at ease, Lisa performed a quick scan of the area with her Giga meter, a ghost-busting device that was sort of a cousin to the P.K.E. Its primary function was to measure psychomagnotheric energy in Giga Electron Volts. The device itself was a hand-held black unit with a large sensor “dome” mounted to the front underside at a slight angle. Above this, two electronic probes swayed back and forth, presumably to pick up or filter out energy.

            Lisa, however, detected none in the area. “Good news: you do not have a ghost,” she told the Belchers.

            “Oh, thank god,” Bob breathed a sigh of relief.

            “NO!” Louise grumbled in her disappointment.

            “Hey! Keep it down over there, I’m watchin’ Armageddon – and I’m not talkin’ about the Bruce Willis movie,” said Gene (Bob and Linda’s middle child and only son), who sat at the far end of the counter in his burger costume with his eyes glued to the overhead television set.

            On the set was a live newscast of the bizarre phenomenon occurring in Gravity Falls. Gene’s outburst drew everyone’s attention to it. “Do you guys have like another team or something that’s handling that?” Bob asked the B-Team Ghostbusters.

            “There should be one,” Meagan told him. “There are at least fifty Ghostbuster sectors across the U.S., each one trained to combat any supernatural threat within any of the four standard time zones.”

            “You mean the five standard time zones,” the bespectacled Tina (the oldest of the Belcher children) corrected her.

            Meagan was skeptical of the fact check. “No…I’m pretty sure there are four.”

            “There are five: Pacific, Central, Mountain, Eastern, and Atlantic,” Tina elucidated.

            “There’s no Atlantic time zone, Tina,” Bob told her.

            “Yes, there is,” Tina remained firm in her case. “If there’s a zone by the Pacific Ocean, then that means there’s one by the Atlantic, too. It’s basic geography, Dad.”

            Scrooge could feel his head aching from this mind-numbing conversation. “You people actually make food here, don’t you?!” he complained.

            Suddenly, the entrance dinged again.

            This time, someone physically walked in: Teddy, a handyman and loyal Bob’s Burgers customer. “Sorry to get here so late, Bob,” he said on the way in. “I had one rough day that only one of your burgers can soothe.”

            Teddy’s arrival was met with perplexing distress…because there already was a “Teddy” sitting at the counter and eating a burger made by Bob long before Scrooge and the Ghostbusters showed up.

            “I didn’t know you had a twin brother, Teddy,” Tina said.

            “Uh…I don’t,” said Teddy, who was just as haunted from seeing his clone.

            Its deception exposed, the mouth of the Teddy clone transformed, growing inhumanly wide and exposing teeth that enlarged and sharpened. It emitted a bone-chilling howl before it attempted to lunge away the counter for Scrooge McDuck and kill him by biting off his head.

            But then its body was caught by some invisible force that pinned it down on the counter. It was at that moment when a young blond male donned in a black leather jacket literally appeared out of thin air, standing over the demonic Teddy clone. A majestic blade materialized in his raised right hand, and he thrusted it into the demon’s chest. The demon burst into flames instantly.

            “Whoa!” Webby yelled. “We need to come to this place more often!”

            “What was that?!” a frantic Bob cried.

            “That was a shapeshifting demon,” the young blonde answered.

            Scrooge chuckled at the young man who saved his life. “Well, bless me bagpipes. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a fellow Shadowhunter.” He then looked to one unoccupied space within the dining area. “You two can de-glamour yourselves now.” At first, the others hadn’t a clue who he was speaking to, and then two more youths manifested – one boy and one girl, both wearing attire that was as dark as their hair.

            “What is with this Buffy the Vampire Slayer convention here?” Linda asked. “Who are you people?”

            “They’re Shadowhunters,” Scrooge explained. “Not exactly good ones either, if they can’t walk into a simple burger joint without attracting attention…even while invisible!”

            “Wait, they were the ‘ghosts’?!” Louie realized of the earlier random occurrence with the entrance door.

            “Why couldn’t the Giga meter detect them?” Leidy asked.

            “Because our tools are far beyond your little toys,” the young blonde snapped before focusing on Scrooge, shaking hands with the tycoon. “My name’s Jace. It’s an honor to finally meet you, sir. I’ve always wanted to stand in the presence of the Shadowhunter legend himself.”

            “Alright, what is a Shadowhunter?” Huey queried, his impatience intensifying after hearing the term for the third time.

            “Follow-up question: has it already been copyrighted? Because I’m looking for a new brand and ‘Shadowhunter’ speaks ‘marketing value’ to me,” Louie pitched.

            Ignoring Louie’s attempt at another scheme, Scrooge told Jace, “I’m assumin’ you’re the one who contacted me. Whatever’s goin’ on in Gravity Falls must be direr than we imagined.”

            “You don’t know the half of it, sir,” Jace said. He shot a quick glare towards Lisa, Leidy, Meagan, and Miguel. “Despite what they have said, the Ghostbusters don’t have the situation under control. In fact, what’s happening is beyond their control.”

            “And what is happening?” McDuck asked.

            Jace paused for a brief moment and then uttered one thing: “Merlock.”

            Scrooge was stricken with a fearful reaction that his nephews, Webby, or the Ghostbusters had never seen in him before. “Uncle Scrooge? You O.K.?” Dewey was the only one who bothered to ask.

            But Scrooge didn’t give his blue-clad nephew any confirmation or denial of his state of mind. Instead, he turned to the B-Team Ghostbusters and strictly demanded, “Get Natalie Venkman on the phone…now!”