Disclaimer: This is a work of FAN fiction. The author does not own any of the characters in this story and is in no way connected with its original creators, Dan Akyroyd and Harold Ramis.

"The Calendar"

1. The Town Hall

His back to his team, Dr. Peter Venkman stood scribbling at the whiteboard in front of him. He could hear his colleagues Winston Zeddemore and Ray Stanz fidgeting in their seats, eager to get this meeting over with. It was Friday after all, and well after office hours. Ray was looking forward to some quality snooze time – it'd been a somewhat lean week for them, but Fridays signaled a real break from the grind. Winston didn't have any concrete plans as of yet, but he was anxious to know what this particular meeting was all about. Peter had dropped the meeting as a last-minute "by-the-way" to them as soon as they got changed out of their uniforms earlier. Only Egon was taking the emergency meeting seriously, but then again, that was only to be expected.

Janine Melnitz walked up to him, carrying some files of considerable thickness. She set the stack down on the table where the Ghostbusters gathered, and took her place beside Egon. She had the clearest inkling out of all of them what the meeting was all about, and she knew it was going to be a long night. It wasn't like Peter to be getting all serious about business like this, but when he got an idea, he wanted everyone to pay attention.

"Okay, Venkman," Winston said. "Enough with the suspense already." Peter turned to face the team. He had a sheepish grin on his face, only halfway apologetic.

Like any other company, The Ghostbusters had their own annual expectations for revenue and sales as well as their own system for managing operations and marketing. Unlike any other company, meetings for planning the year ahead were unheard of, and took the form of dramatic emergency meetings like this one.

"Guys," Peter said, holding his hands up. "Sorry for pulling you in at the last minute like this, but I've been thinking."

"Uh-oh…" That was Ray. Thinking and Peter elicited two reactions. Ray's was the first. The rest braced themselves for the "What – are you crazy?" that will come later. It was only a matter of time.

Peter riffled through the files Janine had prepared for the meeting, selected a few sheets out of the stack and distributed these to each. "We gotta do something to pull up sales fast. I've been crunching some numbers…" And here Janine cleared her throat. "Janine's been crunching some numbers and it doesn't look good."

"What?" Ray said. "Are we in some kind of financial trouble?"

"Not necessarily," Egon said, scanning the file presented to him. "I think what Peter's been trying to say is that the cost of our daily operations is considerably heavier than our projected revenue for the year."

"So you're saying we're not performing?" Winston said, crossing his arms over his shoulders. "What do we do, then? Charge extra for our services?"

Peter shook his head. "It's more than that, guys," he said. "I'm thinking the reason why we've had so few clients in the last months is because we're not as high profile as we used to be. People don't know that we still exist!"

Winston gave this some thought. Peter did have a point – apart from the really big accounts from the Mayor's office (payment of which, took longer than their private clients), little of what the Ghostbusters did caught anyone's attention these days. Sure, they may have been featured on tabloid news magazine shows in the past – some less credible than others, and only when there weren't any sleazy political scandals for the week, but those short, sensationalistic features weren't enough to make their business grow. They'd be celebrities for fifteen minutes and then promptly fade into near obscurity just as quickly as it had happened. Lately, their fifteen minutes have gotten shorter and shorter.

Peter rapped on the table for emphasis. "Ideas, guys. We need ideas." He turned his attention back to his notes on the whiteboard. On it were the words "publicity", "marketing", "buzz generating". Janine rolled her eyes. She heard the exact same phrases that morning on The Today Show. "We gotta bring out the big guns."

There's been a hotshot marketing analyst on the show talking about how self-marketing was the way of the future. He talked about how twenty years from now, ordinary people would be making a name for themselves via the media they put out – whether in print, tv or otherwise. And most of it would all be done digitally – through computers. His bold statement being, "Everything from pets to pornography will be built around a cult of amateurism." Sounded crazy, but then again, it was the 80's, after all.

"You want ideas?" Janine said, a slow mischievous grin spreading over her face. "I've got some ideas."