WEAFF, RGB pre-ish slash

[gilascave]

"OK, Peter, are you ready?" Ray had finished looking over the apparatus and gave him a wide, eager smile.

Peter tried not to shift in his chair. "Ready as I'll ever be, I guess." He glanced down, without moving his head, at the wires attached to his chest and arms.

"Now, Peter." Ray frowned. "This is a very simple procedure. I told you -- all it's going to do is register changes in surface temperature, heartrate, and other very basic physical reactions."

"I know, Ray. I know -- I'm the psychologist who told you which journals to get the experiment out of, remember?" Peter started to raise his hand, realised he'd pull himself free of at least four wires, and held still. Not that it wouldn't take more than a minute to replace them, but they'd already had to do that twice, now, and Ray was going to start looking at him like he was doing it intentionally.

"So you know there's nothing to worry about. Not that the radial-electrometer is anything to worry about, either." Ray paused, and gave him a beseeching look. "I wish you'd change your mind about that, Peter. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't have any lasting effects--"

"Lasting, that's the trick word. Ray, last time you used that thing on yourself you walked into walls for an hour."

"But I'm human! You're a demon, it shouldn't effect you the same way."

"But I've got a human body at the moment, which is why we're doing *this* at all. If I didn't have human responses then measuring my heart-rate wouldn't work. I wouldn't have a heart."

"That would explain why you're in charge of billing." Ray grinned, and ducked out of reach of Peter's out-stretched hand as he tried to swipe him.

"Let's just get this over with," Peter growled, though it occurred to him that there was every reason why he should be encouraging this, and very few -- if any -- reasons he should be complaining and refusing. Although Egon and Ray's past record with new experiments meant that Peter stood a 50% chance of being turned into a demon-chicken, he also stood a 50% chance of actually finding out something useful.

Anything which told him more about how to feel emotions was a good thing, right? Even if it meant being a chicken for awhile? Peter turned his gaze on the monitor Ray was fiddling with, tweaking for the proper read-out rate. Sitting beside it were a stack of cards, face-down. Ray had been preparing them over the last two days, with Winston's help. Currently, Winston and Egon were in the basement, running a check of teh containment grid.

For a moment, Peter thought about the hundred potential emergencies that could conceivably happen which would require his and Ray's presence downstairs. He knew he was just thinking of excuses -- what was so bad about being a chicken, after all? Egon always found a way to reverse whatever they'd done. it might even be fun, Peter told himself.

As Ray looked up at grinned again, he decided that he wasn't sure he believed it.

"OK!" I'm going to show you the first card and you--"

"I know, Ray," he interrupted. "We're not going to skew the results if we skip the introduction."

With a mild frown, Ray nodded, but said, "Just be sure you don't skew the results. just because you know what should happen, don't try to *make* it happen. We need accurate readings if we're to determine any real changes in your emotional behavior."

"I know. Let's just get on with it, Ray."

This time Ray nodded and picked up the first card. He showed it to Peter.

"It's a puppy."

"You don't have to identify what's on the picture," Ray said with a laugh. "Just look at it."

"Can I say it's an ugly puppy?"

"Peter! It is not!" Ray scooted forward and looked around the edge of the card in Peter's hands. They both stared at the card of a small, black and brown mutt. It had lop-sided ears and its muzzle looked as though it had been squashed. "Huh," Ray said at last. "OK, it's an ugly puppy. Winston must have put that one in there...."

"Trying to see if I recoil in horror?" Peter teased.

"Just turn over the next card," Ray said patiently, but with a smile.

Peter decided not to give him a hard time, and turned over the second card. It was a picture of a ball -- obviously one of the 'control' cards, designed to elicit no emotional response from the human subjects. Ideally, as Peter went through the cards, he would react in various, subtle ways to different pictures. Pictures of happy things would cause certain reactions, pictures of unhappy things would cause other reactions.
As a Ghostbuster, not to mention a demon, they knew that Peter's definition of an unhappy thing might be a lot different than what the creators of the experiment expected. A picture of a fire or monster might cause a normal human to react in fear -- but no one expected Peter to react the same way. Ray insisted he and Winston had taken that into account when they'd made the cards.

Part of Peter was curious to find out what they *had* put on the cards.

He flipped through the next four cards, all of ordinary objects. Even though he couldn't see the readout, he could tell there was no reaction. He turned over the fifth and looked at a picture of a large pizza.

Peter noticed Ray glanced up at him, trying to disguise a look of interest. Well, he could have told Ray that a large, extra cheese, pepperoni and green pepper pizza would made him recoil in disgust.

He tried not to grin at Ray as he proceeded through the next few cards. Pictures of a class one ghost, a vintage car, and a mother and child all elicited no response. Then there was a picture of the four Ghostbusters, all in uniform and smiling for the camera -- a publicity shot from their early days in the business. Peter paused there, and could tell Ray was taking note.

It didn't tell him what the machine's readings were -- he didn't notice anything that, well, felt like anything. He proceeded to the next card and found himself looking at a picture of a kitten. It was what any person would call an exceedingly adorable kitten. He set the card in the used stack, and turned over the next.

He knew he wasn't supposed to be examining his reactions, just having them as unconsciously as possible. But he was beginning to think there was something wrong with either himself, or the test. He could pick out half a dozen cards he'd had no reaction to which were clearly intended to have a reaction. His friends knew him well; if he'd been human he would have had clear reactions to half a dozen cards or more. But so far, all he felt was pretty much what he always felt.

Nothing.

Turning over another card, he resisted telling Ray that there was no point in continuing. They'd gone this far, there were only a couple dozen more cards to go through. Then he could wander downstairs and distract himself by pretending to do the piled up paperwork on his desk, or by harassing Janine until she threatened to throw something large at him.

He turned over another card, and saw a picture of Winston, dressed in military fatigues and looking into the distance. There was something in his expression -- the same something that Peter knew was in his dreams at night, and why he never intended to look inside them. He set the picture aside slowly, and in doing so, saw Ray making another notation.

It was harder to resist making a remark about a blind test, if he could see Ray's emotional reactions to *his* reactions. Maybe when Ray made him do this test again for the third or fourth time, he'd toy with the results by watching Ray instead of looking at the cards. But for now he'd play it straight. He set the card down and went through he rest, one at a time, not being terribly surprised to find individual pictures of Ray, Egon, and Janine in the pile.

When they were all done, Ray set his pencil down and looked at Peter with the widest grin Peter had seen yet.

"What?" Peter demanded. Ray ignored him and reached for the stack of cards, counting the out. When he reached the twenty-eighth card, he checked his readings, then turned the card over. "What is it?" Peter took the card out of Ray's hands.

"The card you had the strongest reaction to," Ray said proudly.

Peter wondered why he wasn't surprised when it was the picture of Egon.