#spnxdp

“Phase one has always been to do the homework. If you blindly trust it, you’re just setting yourself up to find whatever you want to see.” She slid off his desk. “Which is what you’re doing now, so maybe just take a step back for a few days? Let’s hit up these haunted woods and see if we can get any more footage for your episode, and when that’s all done, you can go back to this.”

And she could leave and get back to her normal life.

She was probably already regretting her choice to come back; the fact that she’d stuck it out must be because she still loved him. Couldn’t break that adopted sibling bond.

-|- (And, just to prove I am alternating viewpoints....) -|-

“Good morning, Ghostfacers,” he said, since it was—traditionally—morning for those who were up all night hunting ghosts. Technically, Spruce was finishing off his breakfast, not his supper. “As some of you already know, this is a mission that, to the unaware and uninitiated, seems to be nothing more than animal attacks.”

“Keyword being seems,” added Ed, and Harry nodded, because that was true.

“We have seven bodies of hikers torn to shreds within two weeks. These were in groups of two and three, people; they weren’t picked off one by one. We’ll need to look alive out there.”

Spruce, with some obvious effort, swallowed so his mouth wasn’t full before he said, “You want us to go after a ghost that targets people in groups. Like we’ll be.”

“Those hikers weren’t prepared like we’ll be. Only the first group was on the trail; the other two had gone off the beaten path. And if we triangulate the positions where those bodies were found, Maggie?” She’d helped him with this where Ed had not, prepping with him in place of her brother.

“Satellite imagery tells us there’s a cabin pretty much dead centre,” she said as she passed around a printed picture of said satellite image with the kill sites circled in red and connected by a triangle in orange, which was circled in yellow. “I think they’re guarding it. Orange is the known danger zone, if the parameters don’t change, but we need to be wary of anything past the yellow.”

Ed was staring at his (adopted) sister. “You’re doing this with him?”