Local Traditions
fanfiction
ao3
word count: 2026
Amity Park has a lot of strange local traditions that baffle outsiders.
phic phight lets gooo
“Why did we come back here?”
“Come on, Parker. We’re finally gonna catch us some ghosts in this city.”
Parker followed slowly behind him. “I thought you said this wasn’t the place we were looking for? And we weren’t able to get anywhere near any of the ghosts. What would make this time any different, Don?”
Don turned around with a big smile on his face. “Because we’re gonna start how we should’ve started in the first place. We just came in assuming we were gonna be able to find a ghost to capture without knowing what any of the patterns are. Where the ghost attacks happen, how often, which ghosts are attacking.”
He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and shook it around. “We’re going to observe first and then make a plan on how we’re going to capture our ghosts. This time I’m sure we’ll get it.”
Parker shook his head. “What are we starting with?”
Don continued walking down the sidewalk. “We’re going to observe what the residents are doing in relation to the ghosts. They’re gonna know best the patterns of the ghosts. Which ones are a danger and which ones they don’t have to worry about.”
“Okay. We’re going to use this to try to predict when a ghost attack will happen?” Parker asked.
“Yes. Exactly.” Don pointed at someone stepping outside of their house. “There’s someone now! Observe.”
This person who had just exited the house was carrying a cardboard box. They were sure they were taking the box to the recycling bin, but instead it was placed in the grass by their garage. Parker and Don waited until they made their way back instead before they headed across the street to see what was in the box.
Parker knelt down and started rummaging through it. “We have a box of… Smaller boxes? Bubble wrap, sandwiches, and.. A single left shoe? What is this?”
“Maybe-” Don was cut off when a booming voice started talking behind them.
“Beware!” He shouted. “I am the box ghost! And how dare you, foolish humans, plan to steal my offerings!”
“Offerings?” Don asked. “People give offerings to the ghosts?”
“The people of this town understand how powerful and terrifying I am! With my sharp corrugated corners and the booming pops of my bubble wrap! They offer me items in exchange for me not releasing my wrath on this little mortal city!”
Don and Parker exchanged a look together before looking back at the ghost. The ghost stared at them for a few more moments.
The ghost blinked at them.
“I am the box ghost!”
He suddenly grabbed the box out of Parker’s hands and flew away, disappearing in between the buildings of the city.
Don opened his notebook and wrote out the box ghost’s name. “He must be a powerful ghost if they’re offering him things in exchange for him not attacking them.”
“I think he’s annoying.” Parker said.
“Let’s go observe more things. This is a good start.”
They were walking down another street when they caught a whiff of something.
Parker groaned. “What is that smell? It smells like a sweaty cookie.”
“I actually think it smells like gym socks and snickerdoodles.” Don said, scrunching up his nose.
“I think it might be coming from that house over there.” Parker pointed at a blue house. Outside, a teenager was spraying something on the bushes outside their windows.
They walked up to the boy. Don smiled at him. “That sure is some pesticide. We could smell it from all the way over there.”
The boy’s eyes lit up. “Glad you caught the smell. It’s my cologne, Foley. By Tucker Foley.”
Parker's eyes widened and his eyebrows shot up. “Why are you spraying cologne all over your bushes?”
“Gentlemen.” Tucker walked over to them. “Have you ever wanted a cost effective ghost repellent that also acts as the most womanizing cologne ever? The Fenton’s make all sorts of equipment and weapons, but most of them are not for public sale. And if they are, they’re very expensive! Foley by Tucker Foley is only a fraction of the cost! And it works just as well as a ghost shield!”
He leaned forward. “If you’re interested, I can even give you a deal. Two for the price of one. Or half off a gallon bucket with a pesticide wand. What do you say?”
“Sorry, but I don’t think pesticide cologne is really my thing.” Parker said.
Don was busy scribbling in his notebook. “How did you discover this mix of ingredients was a ghost repellent?”
Tucker puffed out his chest with the proudest look on his face. “Lucky shot. Got it on my first try. Discovered it when the school got infected by ghost mosquitoes. It works on regular mosquitoes too, if that convinces you at all.”
“This is how they got rid of the mosquitoes?” Parker whispered to Don. “Weird.”
“Thank you for all this information. Maybe we’ll have to think on it and come back. Have a nice day!”
“You’re not serious are you?” Parker gaped at Don. “This kid’s cologne is probably just so rank that the ghosts wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I can’t believe people are spraying it outside their houses. That’s probably what I’ve been smelling this whole time.”
“We’re observing, Parker.” Don looked at him. “We could get the cologne and compare it to the Fenton’s anti-ecto weapons.”
Parker shook his head. “Anyways. We’ve been at this for awhile, should we head and get some grub? I’m getting hungry.”
“Sure. I could go for some food. You up to burgers? I saw some place called the Nasty Burger and it looked kinda cool.”
“That name does not bode well for us.” Parker typed the name into his phone. “Let’s go.”
It was busy when they got to the Nasty Burger. They walked inside and saw that the line was long. As they walked through the building towards the end of the line, they couldn’t help but notice one strange delicacy that everyone seemed to have on their tray.
“What are they eating? Roses?” Parker leaned forward to whisper in Don’s ear. “That’s so strange. What a weird item for a fast food place to carry.”
“Sam, you have to go get my food for me. I can’t go up to the counter.”
“You just don’t want to order for yourself.”
“No, Sam. The flowers! It’s flower friday.”
“Flower friday?” Don questioned.
“Fine. Just go save our spot. Tucker can order when he gets here.”
“Next!” The cashier called. Don walked up to the counter.
“Hi! Can we get two mighty meaty cheesy melt meals?”
She punched their order into the register. “Anything else?”
“No, thank you! That’ll be all.”
She hit another button and looked back up to them. “Your total is $14.77. Would you like a complimentary blood blossom with that?”
“A what?” Parker frowned at the name.
She looked at them like they were dense. “A complimentary blood blossom. It’s an edible flower with anti-ghost properties. Eating them helps ward against overshadowing.”
“Uh..” Don hesitated. “Sure. We’ll try some.”
They paid her and she printed their receipt out. “Your order will be ready soon. You can wait over there to pick it up when it’s done.”
“Thank you.”
“This town is strange.” Parker’s eyes widened as a realization came over him. “If all these people are developing their own ecto-signatures, do you think they’ll ever get to the point where they won’t be able to consume these blood blossoms anymore?”
Don’s eyes opened wide and he turned to face Parker. “That’s such a good question. I don’t even know.”
The girl who was behind them in line laughed as she was talking to the cashier.
“Sorry, no blood blossoms for us today, Valerie. You know how Danny’s allergies are. He won’t even order his own food on flower Friday’s.”
Valerie barked out a laugh. “I can understand that though. Tell Fenton I say hi, will you.”
“I will. Thanks.”
“Fenton? That Danny kid is the one who registered as a level eight ectoplasmic entity the last time, right?” Don asked.
“Yeah.” Parker looked at the table the Fenton kid had sat down at. “Weird that he registers as a level eight ghost and he’s also allergic to the ghost repelling flowers.”
“Yeah. That is weird.” Their food came out to the counter. Don grabbed the bag and started walking toward the booth the Fenton kid sat in. “Come on. Let’s see if we can overhear any information.”
They slid into the booth next to the teenager and started digging into their food. Even with the offputting name of the restaurant, the food was pretty good.
Sam walked over and slid into the booth behind the. “Valerie says hi.”
Danny sighed. Don peeked over the top of the booth to see him lovingly looking towards the counter. He could practically feel the eyeroll Sam was giving her friend followed by a snort.
“You better not let her catch you looking at her like that during patrol again. The last time she almost got you pretty badly.”
“Come onn, it wasn’t that bad.”
“She broke your nose.”
Don shot Parker a bewildered look at that. Parker stopped mid chewing to make a face.
“Whatever. I just have to be more careful when I’m looking at her.”
“Danny-”
“What is up my dudes.”
“That Tucker kid is friends with him too?” Parker asked.
Don stood up and tried peering over the top of the booth again and looked eyes with the girl. She frowned at him.
“Can we help you?”
Don jumped. “Ah, sorry. I was just, uh, you’re the Fenton kid right?”
He nodded. “You guys are the weird ghost hunters from out of town that didn’t know what they were doing, right?”
“What, we knew what we were-”
Sam barked out a laugh. “You thought I was a ghost and just grabbed me. As if that would do anything to restrain a ghost. How’d the pepper spray feel?”
Don’s eyes widened again. “Not great.”
“Good. Now how about you guys leave us alone. Unless you both want to get sprayed this time.”
“Leave me out of this. I'm sitting in my seat minding my own business and eating my food.” Parker said. Don glared at him.
“Now, now, Sam. Maybe they were interested in buying some Foley. By Tucker Foley. I was giving them my pitch on my ghost repellent slash cologne earlier today.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “We do not need any more people spraying that stuff all over town. It stinks.”
“But my profits are-”
Suddenly the Fenton kid stood up and ran towards the bathroom. Then the whole restaurant went silent.
People started standing up and packing up their food. Don and Parker looked around, unsettled.
“Hey, kids. Where’s everyone going?”
A jock was walking by their table and overheard them. “What are you new here? Everyone knows that if Fentina runs to the bathroom like that a ghost attack will follow.”
“Are you serious?” Parker asked. “Everyone just takes that as gospel?”
“Yeah.” Don looked towards the bathroom. “That’s strange.”
Sam shrugged and packed up her food. “That’s fine. You don’t have to believe us. Stay if you want.”
Don nodded. “We will.”
Tucker snickered as they walked away and soon the restaurant was empty except the two of them.
“They can’t be serious.” Parker took another bite of his food. “Why would the Fenton kid’s potty breaks be any indication of when a ghost attack is going to happen?”
Don shrugged. “Maybe none of their traditions actually do anything. Except for the Box Ghost one. He actually took those things.”
“Maybe everyone here is just-”
“Feel my fury!”
The voice of an older woman emanated through the room. The doors to the kitchen burst in and a meat tornado flew out. It only lasted a few seconds before it moved outside, but when everything settled and went quiet, Don and Parker looked at each other, both covered in meat.
“Don.”
“Yeah, Parker.”
“Can we go home?”
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Uuuugh, do not buy a plane from Home Depot. This is a cautionary tale.
So I needed a plane, and pickings are slim out here in terms of secondhand ones. Which is a shame, because hand planes are one of those things where if you get a vintage one, you're set for a lifetime, whereas a new one is gonna be garbage. But needs must, so I risked getting a Home Depot one. Turns out, I was buying used garbage, someone had already bought it, run it into a nail, and returned it. Which, eh, I can fix it, but that would have been nice to have disclosed, you know? Anyway. So I go to check how flat it is, and the answer is: Very Not. I think they'd attempted to flatten it with a rake, or maybe a Sherman Crab. It was nowhere near flat, nowhere near smooth, and it took nearly two hours of sanding on a stone block to get it mostly cleaned up to 150 grit. So this one's a scrub plane, ain't no way it's worth investing the time to get it all the way to a smoother. It's still a damn sight better than no plane at all.
Then I stripped it down, cleaned out all the someone else's wood shavings, noted that they'd painted the frog contact points, and fixed that. You want those unpainted because paint can do weird things when it's put under clamping pressure. Put an extra washer into the knob because the fit was garbage and it was wobbling around. And then it was time to tackle the iron, which the earlier mentioned nail-finding doofus had apparently left completely alone other than running it into the nail. This company's cheap crappy planes always have irons that look like they were sharpened by someone attempting to use an angle grinder with a slitting disc as a grindstone. They're fricking corrugated, until you spend some quality time with a diamond file unfucking them. Which the other guy hadn't done. By the time I'd got a clean bevel without the appearance of a medieval field system, the nick in the iron had been sharpened out, so small blessings. Took the burr off the back, and it was time to pay attention to the chip breaker. Which needed to be lapped flat because it wasn't, and would therefore have clogged way the hell up in moments had I just used the plane out of the box.
All of this took me the thick end of three hours, and involved a lot of repetitive arm motions. It also left my hands black from the steel dust. But now, after several hours of effort and dealing with bullshit, I finally have a positively mediocre No. 4 hand plane (No. 4 is the size, planes use a very weird system, and what I want to have eventually is a good No. 4, a good No. 3, two good No. 5s so I can leave them in two different setups, and a really nicely sorted No. 7; those will cover basically all the situations I'll need a large hand plane for, and I can perfectly well make my own thumb planes as and when I need them). It's nowhere near good, but it's decent enough that I can take the surface of the wood I need to clean up down to "smooth enough to work with". That shit's getting some love from the power sander once it's had the age scraped off, it's just gonna be all around easier that way.
All this because I wanted another vise on my workbench. But hey, it's enrichment for my enclosure, right? And I have the whole thing of "if I can make a thing Demonstrably Better, that's a huge dopamine hit" going on. I'd have had to be trying really hard to make that plane any worse. If I can't find garage sales, or some kind of Old Guy meetup, I'm gonna be getting any other planes off auction sites. One of those things where "they don't make them like they used to" is unarguably a Bad Thing.
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