Ghostbusters In Love

2. Ghostbusters Begins: Ray Meets Egon

*NOTE: this work is a 13 chapter novella, best read from the beginning. Rated Mature for explicit sexual content, horror elements, adult themes, smoking, alcohol use, and gay ghostbusting shenanigans. Thanks for reading, Stantz x Spengler fans!*

Ever since he met Dr. Raymond Stantz, whenever Dr. Egon Spengler makes a scientific breakthrough, his next move is to go in search of Ray for confirmation. Stanz is the only one who can follow Egon's mathematical leaps.

Before Ray, Egon had never felt this understood by anyone.

They click because Ray and Egon share a special interest in the languages and rituals of ancient civilizations and a fascination with the afterlife, which is uncommon among scholars of math and logic. Egon has never known anyone else to bridge these two worlds the way Raymond does. Not just a brilliant engineer, Ray also holds an encyclopedic knowledge of the occult, arcane knowledge that turned out to be the crucial keystone to all the new Ghostbusting technology Egon has been inventing. Ray claims to descend from a long line of spiritualists and mediums. His mother considered herself something of a witch back in the 1960s. His family has an incredible library of rare books. Without Ray's background, they'd never be making the breakthroughs they are today.

Long before Egon and Ray were busting ghosts, it was their shared belief in the supernatural that made them friends in the first place.
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*Flashback to 1970, at University, autumn in New England*

When they met, Ray was an 18 year old college sophomore, a double major in Divinity and Applied Mathematics. Rarely did those two streams of thought combine, so Egon had been intrigued by the baby-faced, friendly Ray when he saw him around the Math department. But Egon did not approach him until he stumbled upon a paper Ray'd written about the physics of the human soul.

At that time, Egon was an assistant professor, pursuing his second PhD at age 21. Outwardly, Egon was ruled by numbers and rules, but inwardly, hidden behind his pocket protector and glasses, he was deeply curious about the unseen realms of the Universe.

Young Egon was devoutly, one might say, religiously, agnostic. Every field he studied, every degree he collected, all brought him closer to understanding the workings of a God he couldn't quite bring himself to admit he had been hunting for. He needed proof. Since the day his older brother died, Egon had wanted to know for sure that his brother had gone on to an afterlife, that he hadn't been snuffed out of existence entirely. Since matter could neither be created nor destroyed, one had to go on from this plane in some new form, right? There was an afterlife and he would prove it. This is why Egon was a secret scholar of religion and the occult in his free time.

And so it was, that one day in the late fall, Egon was reading through a stack of student papers for his supervising professor, an authoritarian asshole Egon secretly hated. Paper grading was understimulating busy work, so trying to overcome his boredom, Egon tinkered with some electronic equipment while he read. When he came to Ray's paper, he was so excited by the conclusions in Ray's writing, that he simply stood up and marched off to find the student who wrote it, without remembering to put down the device he was working on.

Ray was sitting alone in the cafeteria, finishing up a bland lunch. He loved to eat but this food was a chore. He glanced up, surprised to see a tall, skinny, Ichabod Crane looking man charging towards him, all shins and elbows.

The man stopped at Ray's table, holding a paper in one had and a chunk of machinery in the other.

He said, "You're Raymond Stantz, correct." It wasn't quite a question.