#jaymeow writes

They start investigating! Well, they get snacks first - Shaggy and Scooby have to try Nasty Burger, and the rest of the gang should eat something too.

And who do they find there but Danny, Sam, Tucker and Valerie? Danny hears them talk about wanting to see a ghost, and very tiredly he leans over the booth divider and tells them that if they see a ghost attack, they really should run away. That's what he does, and his parents are professional ghost hunters!

Shaggy and Scooby have a new favorite civilian! Man, someone who understands that it's better to run from scary things! Hey do you want a milkshake and to go play video games while the others go their silly ghost hunting thing?

Tucker is down! Tucker is so down!

Fred is up at the counter talking ghost-catching-traps with Valerie, and she's lividly explaining how the ghost boy destroyed Axiom Labs, him and his monster dog, and the different things she- sorry, Red Huntress - has tried and how the ghost boy got out of them.

Sam is... squinting a little bit.

Here's the thing. Rich people don't all know each other, okay? Especially big rich families who only have one or two public facing heirs and have a bunch of other kids and cousins and niblings that aren't public-facing. But there are... stories... about the Rogers and Blake families. The Mansons are rich because they run a cellophane empire, they're new money - the Blakes have been rich since the 40s, with the main branch running a soap empire and lesser branches in acting, modeling, and managing family land overseas, and the Rogers have just been filthy rich for living memory. That's not the weird part. The weird part is that Daphne Blake and Norville Rogers were born in 1954, and they should not still be teenagers in 2007.

Sam's immediate suspicions are that the gang died in a car crash in 1969/1971, and these are ghosts trying to move into Amity, like Johnny and Kitty. But she can't bring it up in the middle of Nasty Burger. So when Velma and Daphne finish eating and say they're gonna go wander the town, Sam volunteers to come along. The boys are in a heated discussion about Doom versus Pac-Man and Captain Cool versus The Blue Falcon, and Fred is talking engineering with Valerie, so technically none of the other tourists are being left unattended.

So off they go! And dang it, these ghosts of a rich once-heiress and her genius friend are actually nice to hang out with. Sam mentions a charity and Velma has so much to say about the history of that charity and the people it helps! And that time they arrested a corrupt treasury officer to make sure that the charity actually did it's job.

man. Sam kinda likes these two. She really hopes they aren't secretly evil, she'll feel bad.

Meanwhile, Valerie's shift has ended and she's taking Fred to the ruins of Axiom. And he has decades of experience, so he notices - the ruins of the new security system. The abandoned dog kennels. The euthanizing equipment. The evidence of a mass grave for once-beloved security guards. Valerie hadn't known the dogs were put down. She thought they were rehomed.

...maybe the ghost dog wasn't acting out just to cause problems. Maybe the ghost dog is looking for his friends.

She still wants revenge. But Fred wants to know why the ghost dog and ghost boy would go after the lab, and his best theory is revenge for the guard dogs, and Valerie knows that revenge loops can only lead to disaster. Fred wants to investigate the dog trainers next, and Valerie is going with him because yes, she knows that these ghosts are real - but what if the ghost boy is the trainer's dead son?

Smashcut to Shaggy, Scooby, Tucker, and Danny - they are playing Doomed at Tucker's house, with copious snacks, having the time of their lives, and they're talking about creepy things going on.

Now, here's the thing. Rarely do the whole gang find real monsters. It happens, but it's rare. Shaggy and Scooby on their own? They find the real monsters. Shaggy has been kidnapped by vampires, turned into a werewolf at LEAST twice, he's taught gym to monsters, there was the mirror monster Shaggy, he's been haunted, The Rogers Family and the Doos are Always Intertwined. When Danny and Tucker talk about possession and how most ghosts - not all, but most - are just trying to live their lives and are causing problems in the process of that, and then they talk about the GIW... well, Scooby's hackles go up.

Monsters are scary, ghosts are scary, by virtue of being ghosts and monsters. But they're usually befriendable once the boys get over the shock.

They don't deserve to be hunted for being what they are.

Danny and Tucker look at each other, and decide hey, maybe we can test something. They take the boys to the park, and Danny calls Cujo. Fetch ensues.

Sam decides to take the girls to the Fenton Lab. Maybe it's because Daphne mentioned that she's a pretty good backup driver, or because Velma made an offhand comment about driving on dangerous mountain roads, and Sam, with her car crash theory, wants to know how they deal with constantly being around beloved friends they've killed.

The investigation derails that. But only a little bit. The girls figure out near-immediately that someone died for the portal. They can tell.

And then they can help Sam work through the trauma of not just killing her friend once but twice, because at one point she accidentally rewrote reality and saved his life and everything was worse for it.

And investigate the portal. :3 That's sure some really purposefully placed wires, guys. And buttons. The Scooby Girls can fiddle with the portal safely because they're Immortal with a capital I.

It could go Fenton parents being purposefully dangerous or it could be sabotage from someone else like in the one corpse au I can't find. I vote it's someone else because I like the Fenton Parents. But! This has become a murder investigation! And the girls are good at investigations.

The Scooby gang and the trio + Valerie meet up in the park; Fred and Valerie have a lot of information about Dalv Co and Axion labs. Daphne, Velma, and Sam have proof of portal tampering. Danny, Tucker, Shaggy, and Scooby have done their own little investigation into each other, more than anything else.

Valerie gets read in. It's also very important to me that she sees Cujo and works past the hate to pat him on the head. He's just happy to sniff her.