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They always joked about how bad his parents were at ghost fighting. It wasn’t that his mom wasn’t highly skilled; she was (she could kick ass). And it wasn’t that his dad’s inventions didn’t work; they often did (somehow). But for some reason when it came to actually facing ghosts, they just sort of became a bit ridiculous. Danny was pretty sure it was their own biases working against them. Danny had his own ideas where those biases came from, but the important part was that they sort of ensured his parents would always underestimate a ghost’s abilities. Ghost’s weren’t sentient after all, they existed in their own version of reality. Why would they expect a ghost to be ready to deal with ghost hunters?
“This is really unstable,” Danny said. “There’s only so much I can shore up with my ice before I risk giving you hypothermia.”
“Just wait until I get out of here, spook,” his mom said. “As soon as I get free I’ll have you strapped down to my exam table.” She was working very hard at getting free so she could do just that or, more likely, go look for his dad who had a bad concussion outside. Something he’d have to deal with later.
“Sure,” Danny said. “Just turn off the Specter Deflector and I’ll phase you out of there.”
“So you can save me?” his mom asked scornfully. “Or have you found the opportune time to drop the hero act and kill me?”
He should have come as Fenton, never mind how he’d gotten there, never mind he’d still need to use his powers to get her out. He hadn’t thought about how it would work when he rushed in after he saw the building collapse.
“I could just bring the rest of this building down on you,” Danny said. “I don’t need you to turn off your deflector to do that. Heck, you’ll probably bleed out if I just leave you. What have you got to loose?”
His voice didn’t crack as Phantom, but sometimes the outer crackle of his Ghostly Wail came through like it did just then as he begged with his mom to let him save her.
“You could possess me to get after my husband,” his mom said, reaching for something Danny couldn't see. “Why kill one when you could kill both.”
That was a pretty smart idea for a ghost. It was the inconsistencies that always got to him. Danny zoomed around, phasing through what used to be the ceiling above to see what she was trying to reach for.
“The passcode to your security system is your anniversary and the name of the first movie you saw with D- your husband,” Danny said. He handed her the collapsible baton she’d been reaching for and then zoomed back in case she was planning to attack him with it instead of using it as a pry bar. “Ghost Zombies 4. Terrible movie.”
“How-“
“I don’t need to possess you; I don’t want to kill you. I want to stop you from dying,” Danny said. “So please turn off the Specter Deflector, because I’m pretty sure your kids want you to come home tonight.”
“Don’t you dare talk about my children,” his mom said, activating the anti-ghost properties of the baton so it crackled with ecto-energy.
He should just transform; if he were a better person he would.
“Ghost scum like you are always ready to take advantage of human vulnerabilities,” Mom said.
“Wow,” Danny said. “Foresight and desire, it almost sounds like you’re describing a sentient being. Hey, M- Maddie, would a ghost be able to do something that wasn’t in their own self interest?”
“Of course not,” Mom said.
“Imagine if you’re wrong,” Danny said. “We wouldn’t be the ones who are monsters.” He blinked forward. The baton struck him, shocking him. The Specter Deflector drained him. He was stronger than he had been once, though, and at the very least he knew how to deactivate it quickly enough. He wasn’t all that knowledgable about first aid, but he was pretty sure he shouldn’t waste any time getting his mom to the hospital.
He phased the both of them out of the rubble of the building. Danny did a very quick glance around. There was his dad with a paramedic, and there was Skulker, or what was left of him and the street behind where he had been hovering. He couldn’t actually see anything left of Skulker. He’d probably just flown away. Danny wasn’t sure what happened to him. When he saw the building go down he just hadn’t held back. He didn’t stick around any longer. Getting the Specter Deflector off had cost him a lot, and his mom wasn’t helping as she ‘wasn’t going down that easy.’ He dropped her off at the hospital and had to spare time to wonder how long he would have to wait before it would make sense for Danny Fenton to arrive.
Mom got off lucky. The crush injuries on her leg weren’t as bad as he’d thought. A busted knee and some blood loss, but other than that she was fine; she was released from the hospital the following day. Although, that might have been because Dad had been caught one too many times trying to set up a ghost security system for Mom’s room. He’d also gotten lucky. Danny still wasn’t sure if Skulker had gotten lucky.
Danny wasn’t thinking about that, though.
There were hugs and kisses when Dad wheeled her in. He’d thrown a wheel chair lift together from stuff in the basement. Danny was confident in the assumption that his dad had done something crazy like using ectoplasm so it would negate gravity, rather than just using a motor and a scissor lift.
He hugged his mom. The last time he’d held her he’d been flying her to the hospital, and she’d been trying to end him, regardless of how high up she was. He couldn’t help himself but to murmur in her ear, “I’m so glad you came home.”
Jazz ordered food from the Thai place down the street, Mom’s favorite, and they acted like everything was normal. Mom and Dad acted like they hadn’t had a near death experience, Danny acted like his mom hadn’t called him scum while he save her life (and again during that very dinner), and Jazz used plenty psychobabble to describe their the whole situation without acknowledging that Danny was Phantom.
Danny went up to his room. Things had been quiet on the ghost front since his mom had been in the hospital, and Danny wasn’t thinking about that. He was finishing his homework on time, no matter how long it took to do the reading, and then he was logging onto Tucker’s Doomed server and kicking his best friend’s ass, assuming his other best friend wasn’t there to kick the both of them.
“How’s your mom?” Sam asked as she killed his character before he even knew she was there.
“Already going stir crazy, I’m sure,” Danny said. “Can’t wait to go back out there and hunt me some more.”
“It’s been a while since it’s gotten real bad like this,” Tucker said. “We’ve got to reset the days-since-a-building-collapsed counter.”
“Yeah, I want a few shots at Skulker the next time he drops by,” Sam said.
There’s a couple of things there that Danny had to clamp down on so he didn’t say something biting.
“Besides,” Sam said. “I don’t think that building would have collapsed if someone hadn’t decided to shoot at a guy with a rocket launcher from the top of it.”
Danny wasn’t really sure who she had been shooting at; he and Skulker had been so close at the time. It had been almost point blank, when Danny had let loose.
“I’m going to go grab some more snacks,” Danny said.
“You’re not going to catch up to me from the kitchen,” Sam said.
“Email me some chips,” Tucker said.
Danny pulled off his headset and got up, taking a moment to shake some circulation back into his foot. Hopefully his parents would be in the lab. He ran into Jazz in the hall.
“Hey,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“Uhh, Sam’s winning, but I think I can still get second,” Danny said.
“Danny,” Jazz said, with her acting-like-mom disappointed face.
“I’m fine,” he grouched. “It’s not like I was in the hospital.”
“I had to give you stitches a week ago,” Jazz said. “We’re beyond using injury as a metric for how you’re doing. I mean about Mom. I know you’re upset.”
“Sure, I’m upset Mom got hurt, I’m sure you are too,” Danny said. “This isn’t something you need to fix.”
“It’s more about what she was saying about you at Dinner,” Jazz said.
Danny crossed his arms across his chest. “That’s nothing new.”
“You saved her life,” Jazz said.
“She wasn’t hurt as bad as I thought,” Danny said. “I’m sure she would have been fine.”
The memory of the Nasty Burger exploding was so fresh in his memory, he’d been so sure when he saw the roof collapse that his Mom was already dead. It had probably been his imagination, but he could have sworn he heard Skulker laughing in Dan’s voice. It wasn’t Dan that had made Skulker disappear in the wash of a massive ectoblast, though, along with a solid chunk of the street.
“It’s okay to have been afraid and upset,” Jazz said. “Even if everything turned out alright, that doesn’t mean it isn’t normal to still be dealing with what you felt at the time.”
“I can’t afford to loose control like that,” Danny said.
“You didn’t,” Jazz said. “You kept a level head and got Mom to the hospital even when she made things difficult. She's my mom too, so thanks.”
Danny couldn’t hold it in any longer, and he said out loud what he hadn’t been able to say even in his own head. “I think I ended Skulker.”
“Oh,” Jazz said, taking just a slight step back. “A- are you sure?”
Danny shrugged. Jazz moved in then and hugged him, holding on tight. “Even if you did, that’s not on you.”
“I did it,” Danny said. “I lost control, I w- wanted to hurt him.”
“He came into your haunt, tried to kill you, put the people you protect in danger, and blew up the building our parents were in,” Jazz said. “No one would expect you to have control.”
“Well I do,” Danny said. There was a pathway he couldn’t afford to walk down, not even a little.
“Fine,” Jazz said. “You messed up.” She took him by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length. “When someone goes on a violent rampage, they don’t have anyone to blame but themselves for how it ends. Maybe you could have ended it a different way. Next time, you will.”
“Because there’s going to be a next time,” Danny sighed.
Jazz hesitated. “Probably.”
“I should get back to Sam and Tucker,” Danny said.
Jazz hugged him again. “You’re a good person, Danny. Thanks for getting Mom out of there.”
Ectoplasmic scum!
Danny went back to his computer, Jazz came back a bit later to bring him some hot coco.
Eventually he did wind up going downstairs for his ‘ghost vitamins.’ He’d noticed a tangerine in the fridge earlier that was awfully close to a sample of ectoplasm. It tasted like winter frost.
“Danno!” Dad exclaimed as he walked into the kitchen while Danny was contemplating eating the peel that was left.
“Hey Dad,” Danny said. “Did Mom go to bed?”
“Her medication was making her tired, but us Fentons do some of our best inventing in our sleep. Why, did you know I invented the Fenton Fishing Rod after I dreamed I was fishing for ham hocks in the river Styx.”
“It’s come up a few times,” Danny said.
Dad fished a tin of fudge out of the fridge and Danny tried to remember how close it had been to the ectoplasm. He was always tempted to use it as a dip, but he always wigged himself out right before he tried it.
Dad put a piece of fudge in front of Danny and sat down opposite him. Danny just stared at it for a while.
“What’s got you looking so morose son?”
Danny looked at him like his head was on backwards. He looked at the bandage that was still on the side of Dad’s head.
“Hey now, don’t you worry about your parents. No Fenton’s ever going to let some ghost keep them down.”
“You got lucky,” Danny said.
“It’s not like a ghost is capable of getting the better of a couple of experienced ghost hunters.” Dad said, against all evidence to the contrary.
“Then why did Phantom need to carry Mom to the hospital?” Danny asked, standing up. He left the fudge on the table, probably the clearest clue Dad would get how upset he was.
Maddie had decided she would try to do most of her work in the kitchen until she could get on crutches at least. “Did you think something was bothering Danny last night?” she asked Jack as she sipped on her coffee while she waited for her children to join her for breakfast. It had been a long time since they had had breakfast as a family.
“Why do you ask?” Jack asked, sounding a bit hesitant to say anything. That was unusual. Jack didn’t shy away from anything. She didn’t want him trying to handle everything on his own just because she was off her feet for a while.
“He seemed sad last night,” Maddie said.
The hospital had given her too much of her pain killers before she’d left; she hadn’t been up to tracking him down after he’d left the dinner table.
“He’s just upset we were hurt,” Jack said.
That was when Danny himself showed up. She wasn’t terribly surprised to see shadows under his eyes, but he really didn’t look like he had slept at all the night before.
“How are you feeling?” Danny asked her.
“Oh, I’m fine sweetie,” she said. “Don’t you worry about me”
“How much longer till the cast comes off?”
“A few weeks, and I’ll be back out tracking down those ghosts,” Maddie said.
“Why?!” Danny asked. “This isn’t- There are other ways to study ghosts that doesn’t involve hunting them.”
“Come on, Danno, you know we can’t let these ghosts run roughshod around town,” Jack said.
“Phantom and the Red Huntress have that part handled,” Danny said. “You know, sometimes Phantom doesn’t even fight them anymore; there’s a lot of ghosts that just need some help with their obsession, and they’re happy to leave everyone alone. You could seriously learn a lot just talking to one, you know?”
“Ghosts lie Danny,” Maddie said. “And while the Huntress is capable, I’m not going to leave her to do the job alone.”
“Everybody lies,” Danny said. “Ghosts aren’t special, and she isn’t doing the job alone.”
“Ghosts always lie,” Maddie said. “Come on, you don’t want to go to school without breakfast do you? Your father made flapjacks for breakfast.”
“Did Phantom lie when he said he’d take you to the hospital?” Danny asked.
That was a humiliation she wished hadn’t been witnessed by several people around town.
“Good morning,” Jazmin said, entering the kitchen.
“Good morning, Princess,” Jack said. “Your brother was just about to get some pancakes, do you want some?”
“Did Phantom lie, Mom?” Danny demanded.
“Hey, Danny, you know better than to talk to your mother like that,” Jack said. Maddie held up her hand to forestall him. He was right, Danny was clearly more upset about their injuries than he’d let on.
“Phantom’s not going to keep us safe in the field, Honey. We made some mistakes, and we’re going to learn from them when we get back out there, okay? And we’ll be safer. We don’t need to rely on a ghost who has his own ulterior motives for doing what he’s doing. You need to trust that we understand how ghosts really work.”
“You know how one ghost works!” Danny all but exploded at her. “You got lucky with one haunting and you decided that you knew everything there was to learn. It must be nice, isn’t it, being able to conclude that your subjects aren’t sentient; that they’re not people. You can do whatever you want to them. You caught one ghost, one type of ghost, and you came to the conclusions you wanted to come to and anything else can just be explained away, can’t it. You’ve already decided you’re right so you get to hypothesize whatever you want to make it all still fit.
“You thought Skulker’s obsessed with hunting, didn’t you, and you were so convinced that he was just so single minded, that it didn’t even occur to you that he would stray from his prey to attack you instead. You left yourselves wide open because you were wrong about ghosts! And you can say you’ll be alright in a few weeks but you’re just going to go right back out there and make the same mistakes, and maybe Phantom won’t be there next time to save you! Maybe next time you’ll just die, and then what?”
“Danny,” Jazmine said. “It’s good you’re getting this out, but it would be a lot more constructive if you weren’t yelling right now.”
“When has talking calmly ever convinced them of anything?”
Maddie couldn’t just get up and hug him but she reached out to take his hand.
“And how do you think I feel when my own children think that ghosts can be reasoned with?” Maddie said. “That’s going to get you hurt.”
“Ghosts can be reasoned with,” Danny said. “I know, because I’ve reasoned with them.”
“When did you ‘reason’ with a ghost?”
“When I figured out that shooting at them doesn’t always solve my problems,” Danny said.
“Just because you think you understand what a ghost wants-“
“Tell me something a ghost can’t do,” Danny said.
“Have a heart beat,” Maddie said.
“Something a sentient being could do, regardless of if they’re human,” Danny said.
“Like a Turring Test,” Jazmine said.
“Danny, I’m not going to encourage you to go out and play these games with ghosts. If you don’t respect how dangerous they are they will kill you, and I won’t let that happen.”
Danny’s face clouded over. “I’m going to school.”
“You haven’t had breakfast,” Jack said.
“I’m not hungry,” Danny said.
“I’ll drive you,” Jazmine said.
“I want to be alone,” Danny said.
He left the kitchen, and a few moments later the front door slammed shut.
“What’s gotten into that kid?” Jack asked.
“He’s clearly upset about what happened,” Jazmine said. “And that you completely disregard everything he says.”
“I’m not letting my baby get himself killed by ghosts,” Maddie said. “Jazmine, do you know what he was talking about ‘reasoning’ with a ghost?”
Jazmine looked caught out.
“Tell me,” Maddie said.
“He got that rockstar ghost to babysit the pirate kid to keep him out of trouble,” Jazmine said. “They’ve both been pretty, uh, less chaotic since then.”
It had been a while since the electric guitar wielding ghost had been seen, though she didn’t think she’d ever seen a ‘pirate kid’ ghost.
“We need to keep a better eye on him,” Maddie said.
“While I fully support you actually parenting your children-“
“Jazmine-“
“I don’t think putting him under lock and key is going to do anything but encourage him to rebel and take risks.”
“So I should just let him go out and… talk to ghosts?”
“Maybe you should prove your position,” Jazmine said.
“I proved my theories a long time ago,” Maddie said.
“Danny wants to be an astronaut,” Jazmine said. She said it a bit sadly. “He’s incredibly interested in science and exploration.”
They needed to work on Danny’s grades. They’d been so good once, and she and Jack had been so busy since…
“All the more reason for him to be focusing on his school work and not on ridiculous ideas about ghosts.”
“So he’s interested in ghosts right now, let’s give him an experiment he’ll be passionate about. Let’s get him excited about research; he already proposed an experiment. What’s something a ghost can’t do under your current framework.”
Maddie sighed.
“Maybe we could teach him a bit more about ghosts,” Jack said.
Maddie supposed she was going to be doing an experiment.
“Alright," she said. But her baby wasn’t going to be getting anywhere near ghosts until he had a proper understanding of them and she had had an opportunity to teach him the basics of ghost hunting.
“Who was that?” Tucker asked, as Danny pocketed his unanswered phone.
“Just the fruit loop,” Danny said.
“I thought you liked to keep track of him,” Sam said.
“I’m taking a break,” Danny said, ignoring the itch to take care of whatever baloney Vlad was peddling. Though it wasn’t like he didn’t have an inkling of what the man wanted to talk about, and Danny didn’t want to talk about it.
“As long as he isn’t trying to clone you again,” Sam said glibly.
He’d never told them what it had been like in Vlad’s lab that night.
“You ever figure out a way to get your mom to listen to you, Sam?” Danny asked, changing the subject.
Sam snorted. “Sure,” she said. “She was very attentive when she came home from the dentist high as a kite. Even let me come out to her instead of changing the subject. Completely forgot about it later, of course.”
“No luck there,” Danny said. “Pretty sure my mom decided she’d be more ready for the ghosts if she didn’t take whatever the doctors gave her.”
“Things’ve been pretty quiet here,” Tucker said. “I’m pretty sure she could take a break.”
“That’s another thing,” Sam said. “It’s too quiet, we should go patrol tonight, someone’s probably up to something.”
Danny made a non-committal noise.
“Uh oh,” Tucker said. Danny looked over and saw Vlad’s limo pulling up alongside them.
Danny sighed. The door opened and there was Vlad, looking smug and unconcerned about the fact that he was stalking a ninth grader.
“Don’t you have evil billionaire things to be doing?” Danny asked.
“Come little badger,” Vlad said. “Did you think there wouldn’t be anything for us to discuss?”
“I’m not getting in your car,” Danny said.
Vlad sighed dramatically, as if Danny was being unreasonably difficult. “I suppose I’ll just walk you home, I did so want to see Maddie. I’m sure she was very grateful I helped settle things with the hospital.” He stepped out of the car. “I heard the oaf survived.”
“Paying her hospital bill was the least you could do, considering you made the missiles that put her there,” Danny growled.
“Don’t you think people are going to think it’s a bit creepy that some old guy’s walking some teens home?” Tucker asked.
“Nonsense,” Vlad said. “I’m just paying a visit to an old friend. Come now, Daniel, I’m sure you have homework to do. After that Biology test you really should put in a bit more effort.”
Danny just started walking home.
“To business then,” Vlad said.
“You don’t have any business with Danny,” Sam said.
“No?” Vlad asked. “He took one of my pieces off the board. I thought it warranted congratulations at least.”
Danny stopped walking.
“What are you talking about?” Tucker asked.
“Skulker, of course,” Vlad said.
“We take him ‘off the board’ about once a week,” Sam said. “That hardly warrants a visit.”
“Oh, but Skulker won’t be coming back this time, will he?” Vlad asked. “Didn’t Daniel tell you of his victory?”
“Danny doesn’t end sentient ghosts,” Sam said.
“Oh, I suppose my creations didn’t count,” Vlad said.
Danny whirled on him. “You sent unstable ghosts to attack me,” he said, his voice breaking. “I didn’t know they… I didn’t mean to. But you did. They weren’t successes so you threw them away!”
Vlad just smirked at him. “What’s it called when you kill your own clone? Is it just fratricide?”
Sam swore. Tucker put a hand on his shoulder. That was going to be a conversation later.
“I suppose you didn’t mean to end Skulker,” Vlad said. “How did it feel to unleash that sort of power against your enemy?”
“I didn’t… I just needed to end the fight so I could help my mom,” Danny said. “I- He could just be hiding or something while he recovers.”
“His lair is gone Daniel,” Vlad said, and Danny knew it was the truth.
Danny stared into Vlad’s smug eyes as his stomach churned. He turned back and kept walking home. Sam elbowed herself in-between Danny and Vlad and took his hand.
“Stop it,” Sam said. “You said what you came to say, so leave him alone.”
“Oh was that what I came to say? You know, Little Badger, it would only be fair for me to take one of yours, don’t you think?” Vlad asked. “A tit for a tat.”
Danny’s eyesight sharpened exponentially as his eyes flashed green and he almost transformed right there out in the open. He all but shoved Sam behind him as he faced Vlad, ready for any sort of move or indication that he was going to attack.
“If you touch any of my friends, or my family, you’ll see me when I’m not holding back,” Danny said.
Vlad just smiled devilishly at him. “You wouldn’t even know how,” he said. “I could show you how to truly let loose, Little Badger.”
“Why were you at Skulker’s lair?” Tucker asked.
“There is no lair anymore,” Vlad said. “I told you.”
“Why were you looking for the ghost that put Maddie Fenton in the hospital? You don’t care that he’s gone.” Sam said. “For all we know you’re the one who ended Skulker.”
Vlad laughed like it was all a joke. “Perhaps he was just a bad piece. Come now, I don’t want to keep Maddie waiting.”
It was Vlad, this time, who took off with the rest of them following. The rest of the walk was silent, leaving Danny to wonder what had really happened. It wasn’t that Vlad wouldn’t have done it, but Danny just didn’t know what had happened when he had let loose.
Sam and Tucker stayed with him till they got to his house and then he was letting himself in shouting, “Vlad’s here!” He turned around to see if the Vampire could walk on in without actually being invited.
“Vladdie!” Dad exclaimed, coming out of the kitchen. “Come on in you old cheesehead. Great of you to drop by. I’ll just wheel Maddie out here.”
Danny scowled.
He’d been hoping to just slink off to his room when he got home, but he wasn’t going to leave Vlad alone with his parents so he would be stuck chaperoning them in the living room.
Mom, however, had other plans.
“Oh, I’ll let you boys catch up, I actually needed to talk to Danny about something, I’ll be out in a bit.”
Well crud. He didn’t want to split up the party, and he definitely didn’t want to have a ‘talk’ with his mom. Danny wound up sitting at the kitchen table so he could keep an eye on Vlad through the doorway. Probably best to just keep things brief.
“Sorry about this morning,” Danny said. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I’ll, um, do chores or something.”
“You can help me with an experiment, actually,” Mom said.
He’d had dreams that started that way.
“An, um, an experiment?” Danny asked. “What sort of experiment? Like in the lab? Cause no offense Mom, but I’m pretty sure the ecto-filters have it in for me and I might just rather you were mad at me.”
“Not in the lab,” Mom said. “And I don’t want you actually doing any of it, of course. Not till you have a proper respect for ghosts.”
Danny held his tongue.
“But I thought you might help me design an experiment to test out your hypothesis,” Mom said.
It took Danny a moment to process what she’d said.
“Really?” he asked.
Mom nodded her head.
“Like a talking experiment, with no shooting involved?” Danny asked.
Mom hesitated. “If we can design a protocol that can rigorously test your ideas that way, then yes.”
Danny wasn’t sure if Mom should be talking about ‘rigorous’ experimentation, but he’d take what he could get.
“Too easy,” Danny said. He let his backpack fall to the floor and knelt down to pull a notebook out. To be honest, Danny didn’t feel up to a rigorous mental exercise. He was pretty sure that if Vlad hadn’t been there he’d have found himself curled up on his bed staring at his phone till Jazz barged in to talk about his mental health.
He set the binder in front of his mom with a pen. “Theory,” Danny said. “Ghosts are Sentient.”
“Why am I taking notes?” Mom asked.
“Because you hate reading my handwriting?” Danny said. And maybe also because after adapting to four dimensions, his brain didn’t handle linear stuff, like reading and writing, as well and he didn’t want his mom watching him write everything out like a second grader trying not to make any mistakes.
“Hmm,” was Mom’s only response, but she indulged him and wrote out Danny’s ‘theory’ on the top of the page.
Danny was distracted by Dad’s booming laugh and he looked over to see Vlad barely holding up a smile as Dad talked about his latest invention. He was distracted by his phone buzzing.
Tucker: Did you want to talk about that stuff Vlad said?
Danny ignored it.
“Let’s start off with defining terms,” Mom said.
“Terms?” Danny asked.
“How can we test if a ghost is sentient without first defining what sentience is?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know,” Danny said. “I know it when I see it.”
“Well, then you wind up with a moving goalpost that just changes based on what you’re observing.”
Danny restrained himself from rolling his eyes, because that sounded like her thoughts on ghosts in a nutshell, a moving target that moved wherever she needed to so she didn’t have to change her mind. It probably was for the best that they define it, then.
Looking up sentience online didn’t really help though and Mom suggested that they use a different metric. After looking up different philosophical ideas Danny thought that one word wasn’t really going to work. He thought one metric wasn’t going to work.
“Okay,” Mom said. “We have five theories to be tested. One, ghosts have human comparable cognitive abilities. Two, ghosts have agency. Three, ghosts subjectively experience the world outside of their own obsession. Four, ghosts can empathize with others. And five, ghosts can create outside of their own living imprint.”
Danny added in, “and six, only classifying everything from the ghost zone as a ghost is the same as classifying every animal on Earth as a human.”
“One thing at a time, dear,” Mom said.
“Sure,” Danny said. “Then next thing I know you’re holding a conversation with an ectopus to prove your side.”
“There’s no sides in scientific discovery,” Mom said.
Sure feels that way when people shoot at you in the name of science.
“Now we need to decide how to test these.”
“Have a conversation with a ghost,” Danny said.
“That might be a method but it isn’t a test,” Mom said.
Danny was a bit at a loss for how to ‘prove’ any of it. Either it was apparent when you talked to them or it wasn’t. Luckily Jazz got home from the after school tutoring thing she was padding her college application with.
“I didn’t know that Vlad would be here,” she said brightly, but the look she gave Danny said that he should have called her. Dad was still carrying on with his old college buddy.
Mom looked at her watch. “I suppose we should invite him to stay for dinner.”
Danny scowled, but fortunately, Mom was already turning her wheelchair around to go into the living room. “Jazmine, maybe you could help your brother come up with some ideas.”
“What are you working on?” Jazz asked, looking down at the notebook.
“Proving that ghosts are ‘sentient,’” Danny said.
“Well, let’s take a look,” Jazz said, taking a seat next to Danny and grabbing their notes.
“We haven’t gotten that far,” Danny said.
“This is good,” Jazz said. “It’s more nuanced than I thought you’d get.”
“I’m plenty nuanced,” Danny said. “We need to come up with tests. Mom says we can’t just talk to them and see the obvious.”
“How did everything go today?” Jazz asked quietly.
“What, school? It was fine,” so what if all his teachers had written him off, and passing Dash in the hall made his stomach clench no matter how powerful Danny was now. What mattered was that he’d gone a whole day without ghost issues, at least until Vlad had shown up.
Jazz gave him a pointed look. “I’ll get over it,” Danny said. So what if he’d replayed the last moments of his battle with Skulker over and over in his head throughout the day.
“You can talk to your friends if you need to,” Jazz said.
“I thought you wanted to be my shrink,” Danny accused.
“I want you to talk to someone,” Jazz said.
“I don’t even know if I ended him,” Danny said. “You’re the one who said I shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
“Its not about how you should feel,” Jazz said.
“Come on,” Danny said. “Help me develop a 'rigorous protocol’ to test my ‘hypothesis.’”
“Stories.”
“Stories?” Danny asked
“Start a story, ask them to finish it,” Jazz said. “That’s creativity and cognition. Ask them what a character is feeling, that’s empathy. Ask them to incorporate elements from their surroundings, that’s subjectivity. Honestly, if you can get them to actively participate in something that doesn’t involve their obsession then you’ve got agency right there. Of course, mom’s assertion that ghost’s lie to get what they want shows another form of agency.”
“Huh,” Danny said. Jazz had come up with that way too fast.
“Here,” Jazz said, sliding the notebook towards Danny. “Write that down.”
Jazz had never been subtle. “I’m sure I’ll remember it,” Danny said, glaring at her. Just because he knew she was onto him on that mark didn’t mean he was going to admit it.
“It’s only science if you write it down,” Jazz said.
“Can we just not,” Danny said, sounding exhausted to his own ears.
“You could get help at school,” Jazz said quietly.
“I do not need to be in special ed,” Danny said harshly, but just as quietly. “I know I’m already hosed, but I’m not ever going to get into NASA that way.”
“You wouldn’t be in different classes,” Jazz said. “But you could have accommodations. You could take tests orally, someone would read the questions for you and you wouldn’t have to write down the answers.”
“I can read just fine,” Danny said. Just slowly, and with way too much effort.
“You stopped watching anime,” Jazz said.
“Yeah, well, there’s only so many times I can survive mom walking in just when something weird starts happening.”
“Danny-“
Dad saved him by walking in to use the landline.
“What do you kids want from Iron Barbecue?”
Over the course of another few evenings, Danny came up with a testing protocol with his mom. Though things were quiet enough, though, he was starting to worry about finding a ghost to participate.
Things were quiet, but he wasn’t exactly shocked when his ghost sense woke him up late one night. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised that Ember would search him out. Danny transformed quickly and got ready for action. Her guitar was slung over her back, though.
“Come on Baby Bop, I’m not doing this with ghost hunters down the hall,” Ember said.
That was something they could agree on. “I don’t suppose you want to do this in the Ghost Zone,” Danny said.
“I want to see it,” Ember said.
“Oh,” Danny said. “Um, where’s Young Blood?”
“I’m not Young Blood, I’m The Terror of the West!” Terror said, poking his head out from behind Ember. He had long leather boots with spurs, bluejeans, and a cowhide vest over a plain red button up shirt. He’d also swapped out his pirate hat for a straw stetson.
“He met some cowboys,” Ember said.
“Real gunslingers,” Terror said. “Ember said you beat Skulker in a duel.”
“Oh, well-“
“The Little Terror isn’t too choked up about it because Skulk tried to stuff his parrot,” Ember said.
“Oh, where is he?” The bird wouldn’t go with the kid’s new cowboy motif.
“He’s a horse now,” Ember said.
“Ember said a proper cowboy ties his ride up before he goes into a saloon.”
Danny, who didn’t want a ghost horse trampling his room, appreciated that.
“Come on,” Ember said. She floated out of Danny’s room and Danny followed her. He flew off to where the building had collapsed. He hadn’t been by since, and looking at it now he wondered how his parents had survived it. The whole street had been cordoned off and some of the big machinery for the cleanup had been left overnight. He floated down and landed in the crater in the street.
“Well heck, Baby Bop, remind me not to get on your bad side,” Ember said.
“Why aren’t you yelling at me?” Danny asked.
“Why would I be mad at you?” Ember said. “Skulker finally got the fight out of you he wanted. His dumb fault it didn’t go his way.” Her tone wasn’t as careless as her words.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “I wasn’t trying to-“
“Don’t say that,” Ember said. “Get one last jab at his ego why don’t you.”
“Skulk’s ego was pretty big,” Terror said. Danny hadn’t noticed him getting his horse, which he was riding astride just then. The horse was skeletal and pawed at the ground it was floating over and gave a snort.
“You got that right,” Ember said. She landed in the crater and took a seat, her back resting against the side. She pulled her guitar around and started playing. It was a mournful sound.
Terror made a disgusted sound. “Come on, Phantom, let’s play High Noon,” he said.
“Um,” Danny said, not sure he wanted to fight any ghost, much less a kid one.
Ember sat up straight. “Hey cowpoke, this town ain't big enough for the both of us,” she said in a husky voice.
“I reckon it’s time you got out then,” Terror said, growling a bit too much and taking a wide legged stance, one hand over a holster that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“You’re the one’s gon’ be leaving in a pine box,” Ember said.
“Count of three,” Terror said.
“One,” Ember said, cocking her guitar to the side.
“Two,” Terror said, spitting off to the side, the classic spittoon sound going off from nowhere.
“Three,” they both said at the same time. Terror drew a gun and fired while Ember strummed her guitar. Danny watched a rubber dart hit a wave of sound and get blown back followed by Terror.
“You’ve got a lot to learn before you’ll be ready to rustle around these parts,” Ember said.
Terror hammed it up a bit with the whole getting shot thing but then after a moment of silence-
“Wooo!” Terror yelled getting back into the air. “Now Phantom, now Phantom.”
Danny relaxed a bit. “Kid, I’ve been Sheriff of this town since before you ever even seen a horse,” Danny said, going for his best John Wayne.
Terror squared off against him. “There aint no law out here in the west,” he said.
“Mid-west,” Danny said. “But, uh, you can either come quietly or you’ll see why this is no town for an outlaw.”
“I reckon there’s a third choice there where I make this town mine,” Terror said.
“Three,” Danny said, squaring his shoulders. If Amity Park was on the line, he couldn’t slouch.
“Two,” Terror said, pulling the brim of his hat lower like he was getting the sun out of his eyes.
“One,” Danny said. He dodged out of the way of Terror’s rubber dart and opened up his core, letting a pool of cold form in his hand. When he slung it forward, a snowball formed and pegged Terror in the face.
Terror fell backwards once more, motioning with his hands as if blood was spurting out of his head.
“Hey,” Terror said. “What is this stuff?”
“It’s snow,” Danny said.
“Really?” Terror asked. “Gosh, I’ve never touched snow before.”
Danny figured if Ember needed a moment to mourn Skulker, the least he could do was keep an eye on Terror for a while.
Danny turned the street into a winter wonderland.
Terror started running around. It didn’t take him long to figure out snowballs and it had been a long time since Danny had had a snowball fight. Eventually, Danny taught Terror how to make a snow man. “How many of these do you think you can make?” Danny asked.
“So many,” Terror said, running off to make another. Danny floated over to the edge of the crater where Ember was still strumming at her guitar. She looked up at him and flew out and to the top of the building that had once had a neighbor on the other side of the street. Danny flew up and sat next to her on the ledge. Below them, Terror played.
Ember took a swig out of a bottle of something and handed it to Danny.
Danny took a sniff. “Oh, um-“
“A drink for Skulker,” Ember said.
“A drink for Skulker,” Danny said, taking his first ever drink. As if he was in some teen movie, he coughed and hacked as his eyes watered.
“So which one of you did that?” Ember asked, pointing at the pile of rubble across the street.
“Skulker did,” Danny said.
“Always making a mess,” Ember said fondly.
Danny started to feel warm all over, like a whole body blush. Odd, considering his ice core. He looked at the bottle in his hands.
“Does this even work on ghosts?” Danny asked.
“Depends on if you think it should,” Ember said.
“Huh,” Danny said. This was not a revelation he would be sharing with his parents. He took another drink, ready for it then, and handed it back. It burned going down, which probably answered his question.
“Alcohol tastes disgusting,” Danny said.
Ember snorted. “Skulker made moonshine on his island,” she said. “Freaking hipster. I guess the bottle’s yours though.” She pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to him. “Skulker’s will.”
“Skulker put me in his will?” Danny asked, feeling rather horrified.
“Just read it,” Ember said.
Maybe Danny was being dramatic, but he grabbed the bottle and took another drink before he took the paper and unfolded it.
Skulker’s will was very short. “To the hunter who gets the best of me,” Danny read aloud. “Congratulations.” His voice broke on the word. “The successful hunter gets his trophy. My helm shall adorn your mantle and everything that was mine is yours.”
If Danny had had lungs, he would have been hyperventilating. He let the paper fall to the street below. “I, um, his helmet, there wasn’t anything left.”
“He had more than one,” Ember said. She pulled a helmet out of her own fourth dimension, something Danny was still working on. She handed it to him.
“Most of his stuff floated off when his lair broke up, and the only reason his trophies never dissolved was because he was keeping them around. Managed to snatch this, though.” She pulled out a pauldron and slapped it on Danny’s shoulder. “He’d left the moonshine at my place a bit ago.”
Danny stared down at the helmet in his lap numbly. It was lifeless without Skulker inside. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” The words seemed to blur together.
Skulker was gone, his clones were gone, he hadn’t even flinched.
“I’m not him. I’m not him, I won’t become him,” Danny sobbed.
Ember threw an arm around his shoulder. “Of course not. You’re Baby Bop. That won’t change. You’ll always be a little twerp.”
“You don’t know that,” Danny said.
“I know a lot of ghosts that wouldn’t be ate up about ending the ghost that was trying to end them.”
“I didn’t want to kill him,” Danny said. “But people were in there, and I couldn’t fight him and save them too.”
Ember didn’t say anything, but she kept her arm around his shoulders while he cried for a while.
“Is Phantom hurt?” Terror asked, suddenly at their side.
“Nah,” Ember said. “Baby Bop’s just chuffed over Skulker.”
Terror shook his head. “Big boys don’t cry,” he insisted.
“That’s just what grown ups say ‘cause they don’t want to hear you blubbering.”
Terror nodded his head as if this was sage wisdom. “I cried when I got lost in the Badlands,” he said. “But that was forever ago.”
“Was that before or after you met me?” Danny asked, trying to put on a brave face for Terror. He wasn’t sure what a boy so young would consider forever ago. Hearing himself talk though, he was definitely tipsy, so that probably made him a terrible assistant babysitter.
“Before,” Terror said. “When Courage was still a dog.”
Danny wasn’t sure he wanted to know how long ago Terror had lived.
“Hey Terror, I’m going to come down in a minute to rustle your gang of snowmen out of town, so you’d better make some more before I do,” Danny said.
“You can’t defeat the Wild Boys Gang,” Terror declared, before zooming back down to make more.
“Have you been okay?” Danny asked.
Ember shrugged. “Skulker was fun. He was also a headache. I don’t know. Neither of us were really the settling down type.” She handed Danny a handkerchief. “I’m gonna throw a concert for him in the Blasted Lands; you should come.
That sounded like a bad idea. What else could he do? “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
Ember held up the bottle. “To the greatest hunter the Zone has ever seen,” she said.
They traded the bottle.
“To the ghost that always kept me on my toes,” Danny said.
“To the zone’s most inconsiderate boyfriend,” Ember traded.
“To the worst hairstyle on any ghost,” Danny said.
“Ancients, I doused it out the last time he tried to use my guitar string as a snare trap,” Ember said.
Danny looked down at the growing chaos in the street. “Come on,” he said. “If we’re not careful, Terror’s going to go rob a stagecoach.”
Danny hopped off the ledge and found out that alcohol and flying didn’t mix very well.
When the ghost proximity sensor picked up powerful ghosts near Fentonworks in the middle of the night, they’d had an unusual conversation where they actually debated if they should go chasing after them. They’d agreed that they would’t go hunting until after Maddie was back on her feet, but when Jack took a closer look at the scanner and saw Phantom’s signature flying away at a sedate pace with a couple of other ghosts, they decided to at least go out and do some observation. At the very least, they might manage to catch the tail end of a ghost fight. They hadn’t expected to see Phantom creating a snowscape to play in the snow with some invisible ghost.
“Which one of them did that to the street?” Maddie asked seeing the crater in the middle of the road.
“Phantom,” Jack said. “Right after the building collapsed.”
It was rare that they got a good look at a display of power from Phantom that they could measure. Like how much energy it would require to vaporize that much asphalt and bedrock.
“There’s another one,” Jack said, pointing.
It was the rock star ghost. “We should have been using the ghost gabber amplifier,” Maddie said. After the last time the ghost had come through town, Maddie had hypothesized that there could be something more in the ‘music’ it produced.
“Didn’t Jazz say the rockstar was babysitting some pirate kid?” Jack asked.
Was Phantom playing with a child ghost? It didn’t make sense. Why were none of them fighting? Phantom had to have the broadest obsession of any ghost she’d ever come across. Whatever he’d been doing, he’d stopped and had flown up to the ledge of a building to sit next to the rock star. Down below more snowmen began to form and then they started animating, having duels under the full moon above.
Jack went back to rummage through the GAV, he came back with the gabber.
“They’re drinking,” Maddie commented.
“Must have been hooligans,” Jack said.
He set up the gabber.
“Skulker put me in his will?” That was Phantom.
Jack and Maddie shared a look. A will?
“A spook wouldn’t have a will,” Jack said.
Maddie hushed him and turned up the volume to hear him say something about a helmet.
Things just became more bizarre from there.
“This has to be an act,” Maddie said. “They know we’re watching.”
“Phantom actually sounds a bit tipsy,” Jack said.
“An act,” Maddie said.
Creation outside of their own living imprint. At the same time, there was still so much they didn’t know about Phantom yet. Ghosts lied, but it should be lies that aligned with their obsessions, the things they ‘knew.’ Creation, and acting was a form of creation, was impossible for them. Not unless it was within those confines. Phantom’s confines had been stretched thin by that night’s events, though, and the guitar wielding ghost had always seemed straight forward before. Maybe they could pick things up after they formed. It was an easier explanation than a display of empathy and grief from a ghost.
They continued watching as the two (three?) ghosts went back down to street level and threw snowballs around. Maddie had wanted to see ghosts fight.
When Danny woke up, he wasn’t prepared to see Skulker’s helmet staring at him from across the room. He startled, transformed, and readied an ectoblast before he realized that it was empty. That was going to be a thing, he supposed.
“Danny,” Jazz called out, already turning the handle to his door.
Danny quickly transformed, forgetting that he was hovering over his bed.
“Oomph,” Danny said. It was then that he also realized that he had a splitting headache.
“Are you okay?” Jazz asked. “I thought I heard something.”
“Just startled myself,” Danny groaned.
“Did you sleep in your binder?” Jazz accused.
“Um…” Danny said. “No.” It was pretty obvious he hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet that morning. He rolled over and tried to shade the light from the hallway.
Jazz was suddenly pulling up on one of his eyelids. “Are you hung over?” she whisper shouted.
Oh. That explained the headache.
“Skulker made moonshine on his island,” Danny said.
“Oh,” Jazz said. “So he’s alright, then?”
It took Danny a moment. “No,” he said. “He’s gone. Ember came. I guess he left everything to the guy who…”
“Oh that’s fascinating.”
“Jazz!” Danny said, and then regretted it. He flopped back on his bed holding his head.
“Sorry,” Jazz said. “But that’s what you get for drinking.”
“I was drinking to Skulker,” Danny said. “What was I supposed to do?”
Jazz started tidying up his room. “You were supposed to say, no thank you, I’m too young to drink.”
“I literally killed the guy,” Danny said.
“Drinking isn’t a healthy way to handle guilt, Danny.”
“Well, I talked to someone, anyway.”
“Ember?” Jazz asked.
Danny nodded.
“Fascinating,” Jazz said. “Oh!” She’d finally seen Skulker’s helmet.
“He wanted me to put it on the mantle, but my bookshelf is going to have to do,” Danny said.
“Well, that’s not healthy,” Jazz muttered.
“Nothing’s healthy,” Danny said.
Jazz sighed before leaving the room. Danny closed his eyes, hoping she was going to let him go back to sleep, but she came back with a bottle of water.
“Mmm, thanks,” Danny said, realizing he was really thirsty.
Next thing he knew she was throwing a sports bra at him, though. “You’re going to have to wear that today,” she said.
“Actually,” Danny said. “Can you just tell Mom I’ve got a fever? I’m really not feeling like school today.”
“I’m not enabling you,” Jazz said.
“It’s a mental health day,” Danny protested.
“It’s a hangover day,” Jazz said. “If you can make it out the door I won’t tell Mom and Dad why you can’t.”
“I was drinking to his memory,” Danny complained. “This isn’t a habit or anything.”
“Pretty sure you don’t get hung over from one drink,” Jazz said.
“You’re the worst big sister,” Danny said.
“Nope, the votes are in, I’m the best.”
“Well I didn’t vote for you,” Danny said.
“Come on, I’ll drive you,” Jazz said.
“So you can keep lecturing me?” Danny asked.
“Because I don’t want you flying,” Jazz said.
“That’s fair.”
Jazz didn’t lecture him in the car, but it was a nonstop talk about his feelings. Well, one stop so Danny could throw up at the side of the road.
Danny at least had hoped for a quiet day at school but, after getting the hallway trashcan dumped over his head by Dash, a ghost had shown up, ready to cause havoc. Maybe Ember had told everyone that Danny wasn’t ending every ghost that came through the portal. Whatever the reason, from that day on things seemed pretty normal in the ghost department. Danny went to Ember’s concert, listened to a ballad to the man he’d killed, and gone home to disappoint his parents at dinner with the D he’d gotten on his latest math test. He’d known the material, he just hadn’t been able to work it all out in time. Mom was on crutches now, and soon enough she would be back out chasing after ghosts, and Danny at least was feeling somewhat confident that the tests he had worked out with his mom might keep her from getting into any fights for at least the short run.
What would he do the next time a ghost took a shot at her?
Nothing happened much with their ghost sentience project for a while. Mom and Dad were observing ghosts, but weren’t ‘engaging’ with them, whether that was to fight them or to talk to them. Certainly no ghosts where dropping by the kitchen for a cup of tea. Mom didn’t seem as much like she was patronizing him when they talked about the project, though, which was nice. Maybe all their talk had actually sparked an interest within her to actually learn more about ghost mentality rather than just learning more about their ‘physiology.’
“Envy for the living is hard baked into a ghost’s core, it’s why they form in the first place, the anger at the injustice of their death turns outward in those final moments and cements into the core of their being, everything else about their obsession is built on that foundation,” Mom said. “Maybe something more can grow on top of that, if we completely disregard my data, but that foundation will always be there."
That sure wasn’t what was going through Danny’s head when he had died, nothing but desperation and regret. Not that he was going to tell her that. It was a bit late at night to drop that bombshell. Mom was still doing most of her work from the kitchen and Dad had taken to running most of their lab work by himself after dinner.
“You’re describing a revenant; you captured a revenant, Mom. Most of them don’t even make it through to the ghost zone. That’s why you were able to catch one in Tampa.”
“We’ve seen no evidence of ghost ‘species,’” Mom said.
“Have you been looking?” Danny asked. “I’ve got about a dozen different classifications.”
“You can’t just point at a ghost and try to match it up with whatever you’ve seen in movies,” Mom said.
“It’s not that,” Danny said. “Okay, so revenant just really worked, but most of them are my own classification. My chart is changing all the time as I figure out more stuff.”
“You have a chart?” Mom asked.
“Um, no?”
“Danny, you can’t be afraid of peer review,” Mom said.
“What about mom review?” Danny asked.
“Come on, go get it,” Mom said.
Danny sighed, but got up from the kitchen table and trudged up stairs. There was way too much information there. Mom was going to figure out he’d been spending a lot more time around ghosts than he’d let on, but maybe it was important. Maybe she was ready to listen more. Danny printed out the latest version he’d put together and headed back down stairs.
“Okay, first just promise not to get mad,” Danny said.
“I’m not going to get mad just because I disagree with your theories,” Mom said.
“Just promise,” Danny said.
“Fine,” Mom said indulgently. “I promise.”
Danny nodded and put the little packet down on the table in front of her. The top page was the taxonomy diagram followed by individual pages for each section. Mom’s eyes widened as she thumbed through it. She reached over and put the diagram at the edge of the table and then started laying out the rest to match.
“This is- thorough,” Mom said.
It really helped when he had a better understanding of what he was dealing with.
“Ghost born? Danny, ghosts definitely can’t procreate.”
“Lunch Lady and Box Ghost had a kid together,” Danny said. He pointed to Box Lunch’s photo on the relevant page.
Mom kept looking things over. “Was this picture taken inside the ghost zone?!”
Okay, he’d forgotten about that bit.
“You promised not to get mad,” Danny said.
“Danny!”
“You sound mad.”
“Bad enough you went for a joyride in the Fenton Speeder, but you went for a joyride in the Ghost Zone? The most dangerous place you could possibly go? Your father and I haven’t even decided we’re ready to go in there, yet.”
“It wasn’t a joyride, I was doing stuff,” Danny said.
“Stuff?”
“Well this for one,” Danny said, indicating all the papers on the table.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?”
“Don’t act like you didn’t open a portal to the Ghost Zone right below where I sleep,” Danny said. “Of course I know how dangerous it is; ghosts have almost killed me and my friends a bunch of times when we were just minding our own business. Guess what, though, it turns out you can make things safer when you actually learn about ghosts! And if you were right about envy, I probably wouldn’t have collected half of that.”
“How long has this been going on?” Mom asked.
Danny hesitated. “From the beginning.”
“So you decided NASA wasn’t realistic and decided to just explore the Ghost Zone instead of space,” Mom said.
“Who said NASA wasn’t realistic?” Danny asked, his voice definitely not as level as he would have liked.
“Well, your grades haven’t exactly been stellar,” Mom said.
“I’m not too dumb for NASA!”
“I didn’t say you were dumb, but clearly you haven’t been putting in the effort. Instead, you’re chasing after nonsense and putting yourself in Extreme Danger!”
“The only thing I can actually manage since the stupid accident IS effort,” Danny said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Danny.” It was Jazz, standing in the entryway. Just great. “Maybe you should-“
“I’m not stupid, I don’t need help,” Danny said and stormed past her to his room.
“Did you know about this?” Maddie asked, taking in the evidence of Danny’s recklessness.
Jazz walked forward and started studying the diagram.
“Is that really what you want to know right now?”
“Jazmine, I don’t have time for this right now.”
“Of course you have time,” Jazmine said, picking up one of the pages. “It’s not exactly college level writing, but the detail here’s really good.”
“That’s besides the point,” Maddie said. “If anything, it just show’s that he’s been wasting school time to go chasing after ghosts.”
“I thought you wanted us chasing after ghosts,” Jazmine said.
“With training and supervision,” Maddie said. “You can’t possibly approve of this.”
“I think Danny showed you this for a reason.”
“A cry for help.”
“Well yes, but no, Mom, what do you think it would be like, knowing that someday your parents could come home with someone they strapped down to a table in the basement and then medically tortured to death.”
“You can’t torture a ghost,” Maddie said.
“Don’t you think you should be absolutely sure about that? Don’t you think you should do everything in your power to be certain that the beings you’re hell bent on experimenting on aren’t actually people? Can you understand why Danny might be seeking out his own way of doing things? He isn’t doing this for the wrong reasons.”
“That’s not his responsibility,” Maddie said.
“Then do it for him,” Jazmine said. “Read this stuff. And maybe instead of humoring him, you could actually listen.”
Maddie looked at the papers arrayed out on the table. When had he even found the time for it all? How had he done all of this under her nose?
“What else don’t I know about him?”
“Lots,” Jazmine said.
“What were you telling him he should tell me,” Maddie asked.
Jazmine hesitated. “Danny’s dealing with a lot right now. Maybe this isn’t the time.”
“What did he mean the only thing he can manage is effort?”
“Well, he hasn’t actually told me.”
“But you know?”
“Of course I know, because I pay attention instead of just scolding him for getting bad grades.”
“Jazmine.”
“Talk to him, but maybe don’t accuse him of things you don’t actually know anything about.”
“I didn’t accuse him of anything.”
“You said he gave up on NASA,” Jazmine said. “And you don’t know the half of what he’s dealing with.”
“He’s dealing with ghosts, in the Ghost Zone,” Maddie said.
“Sure,” Jazmine said. “And he’s doing a good job of it.”
Maddie looked over the pages on the table again. Tried to really take in what was there, what her son had been going through. All the way on the left was the base classification, the domain, of ghosts; three kingdoms, the dead, ghost born, and zone born; and from there the phylum were the same for each kingdom, humanoid, animal, plant, and blob. He had skipped down to genus after that and instead of species he had developmental stages. He’d definitely been putting in the effort.
“We aren’t torturing ghosts,” Maddie said.
“You sure make it sound like you want to,” Jazmine said.
Maddie’s eyes scanned over the pages all the way on the right, looking at the examples of individual ghosts that Danny had collected. Besides supporting observations for their classification, some of the details were downright personal, and Maddie could actually believe he’d actually had a proper conversation with a ghost. For others though, it was clear he’d done research. There were references to obituaries and other historical materials. There were tactical notes as well. Good tactical notes.
“He’s been fighting them, too,” Maddie said.
“Hard to avoid with some of them.”
How could she have missed this?
She found the ghost she was looking for. “What does this mean?”
Jazmine looked at the symbol next to the ghost she was pointing at and hesitated. She always hesitated when she didn’t have something made up already.
“I think that means the ghost was ended,” Jazmine said.
The ghost that had put her in the hospital. She remembered two ghosts sat next to each other on a rooftop on an unnaturally snowy night. Two ghosts, who had by all appearances, been mourning another one.
“Phantom ended the hunter ghost,” Maddie said. The great big gouge in the street.
Jazmine nodded.
“Danny wasn’t there though, how would he know?”
Jazmine rolled her eyes. “Mom, he talks to ghosts.”
They’d noticed Phantom wearing the armor piece he’d been given that night whenever he was about; a trophy, or a memento?
Don’t you think you should be sure?
“Phantom’s not on here,” Maddie said.
“Maybe he’s hard to classify,” Jazmine said.
Maddie started gathering up the papers, careful to keep them in order. Jazmine handed her her crutches.
Danny wasn’t in his room though, and it was already pretty late. She looked out his window. The Fentonworks sign had been turned off. She supposed she was heading up to the roof. On the way out of his room, though, she saw a familiar looking helmet on one of his shelves. What on Earth? The shelf was mostly empty, with only the framed and rather poor results of Danny’s CAT exam on one side, and, of all things, a packet of Nasty sauce on the other.
Maddie made her way up through the Ops Center and out onto the roof. It wasn’t her son, though, staring up at the stars and floating on his back.
“You,” Maddie accused.
Phantom spun around to face her. “Oh, um-“
“Where’s my son?” Maddie asked, dropping one of her crutches so she could grab a blaster.
“Hey, be careful,” Phantom said.
“He came up here,” Maddie said.
“Yes,” Phantom said.
“Where is he?” Maddie asked.
“He asked for a lift down,” Phantom said.
“What?”
“You don’t remember sneaking out when you were his age?”
“Do you?” Maddie asked. With one crutch, it was difficult to hobble around the roof and look for any evidence of foul play while also keeping her blaster on Phantom. She remembered a crater in the street. ‘Imagine if you’re wrong,’ Phantom had said over a month ago. ‘We wouldn’t be the ones who are monsters.’
The helmet was in Danny’s room.
“He talks to you,” Maddie said.
“Um, yes?”
“You gave him that helmet,” Maddie said.
“Oh,” Phantom said.
“Why?”
“Didn’t have anywhere else to put it,” Phantom said.
“Why keep it at all? You ended that ghost.” He was wearing a piece of it.
Phantom looked down. Taking his eyes off of the hunter with a blaster trained right where his core should be.
“It’s what he wanted,” Phantom said.
“Danny?”
Phantom shook his head. “Skulker.”
That’s what Danny had called it.
“You took my son to the Ghost Zone,” Maddie said. It was the only thing that really made sense.
“What? No, he is definitely not in the Ghost Zone.”
“Before,” Maddie clarified. “You’ve taken him to talk to other ghosts.”
Phantom hesitated. “Would you rather he go alone?”
You can learn all sorts of things if you just talk to them. He’d been doing this for months.
“Did he say where he was going?” Maddie asked.
“Um.”
“Danny,” Maddie clarified.
“Oh,” Phantom said. “Nasty Burger.”
That boy was always hungry. And apparently he could look out for himself, to an extent.
Maddie squared off with Phantom, but lowered the blaster.
“I have a question for you,” Maddie said.
“I feel like I’ve answered a few already,” Phantom said.
“I’m going to start a story, and you’re goin to finish it,” Maddie said.
“Oh, I’m not really-“ Phantom gave the facsimile of a sigh. “Okay, yeah, why not. Don’t expect any Tolkien here, though.”
Danny had said he knew it when he saw it. Wasn’t she already seeing it? Hadn’t she seen it as two ghosts sat on a rooftop? Hadn’t she seen it when Phantom had begged her to allow him to save her life?
“Why were you looking at the stars?” Maddie asked.
Phantom froze. “That’s not a story,” he observed. “Want me to tell a story about the stars? Give me a constellation and I’ll give you a brand new legend.”
“What’s yours?” Maddie asked.
Phantom laughed, nervously. Nervousness, an emotion he shouldn’t feel.
“My mom used to take me out to look at the stars,” Phantom said. “When I was little.”
“You remember that?” Maddie asked.
Phantom nodded. “The dead don’t all remember, but some of us do.”
Remember things related to their obsessions, maybe.
“What’s your obsession?” Maddie asked.
Phantom seemed to shudder. “Okay, I’m pretty sure you’ve been told not to ask that question if you want to have a civil conversation with a ghost.”
“You still seem civil,” Maddie observed.
Phantom sighed again and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, well we aren’t all the same.”
“I want to understand,” Maddie said, and the look in Phantom’s eyes became vulnerable. Maddie stayed silent until-
“What do you think it is?” Phantom asked.
She’d never been able to figure it out. Except, she’d always had so many preconceived notions about what a ghost could be. What would she guess if she just went off what she’d seen of him?
“Protection,” Maddie said.
“Oh?” Phantom asked.
“You died protecting someone,” Maddie said.
Another shudder. “I died hurting someone. I did the stupidest thing of my life right in front of my best friends and the last thing I could think of was that I couldn’t do that to them. That I couldn’t make them watch me die. I knew my mistake was going to hurt them. I had to stop them from feeling that. I had to live.”
He understood what death did to the living.
“I’m sorry,” Maddie said.
Phantom looked her in the eyes, shocked.
“So you’re not protecting people from ghosts, you’re protecting them from loss,” Maddie said.
Phantom shook his head. “You can’t boil it down like that. You can’t boil us down like that. It’s complicated, we’re complicated. Besides, that’s not it. Not even close.”
“Then what?” Maddie asked.
Phantom pointed up. “The stars.”
“The stars?” Maddie asked. “But what does that have to do with-“
“It doesn’t,” Phantom said. “Protecting the town just made sense, though.”
“Your obsession is the reason you exist,” Maddie said.
Phantom floated just a bit lower. “The stars are the base of the pyramid,” Phantom said.
“Pyramid?” Maddie asked.
“The hierarchy thing,” Phantom said.
“Maslow’s hierarch of needs,” Maddie said.
“That, yeah, take care of that and you can worry about the rest of you. Go stargazing, follow NASA on twitter, float on your back staring at the stars and pretend you’re in outer space. I’ve been there you know, or orbit at least.”
“You went to space?”
“Technus took over a satellite,” Phantom said. “It was beautiful, you know? I mean satellite photos are great and all, but you have no idea until you’re actually there, the way the light bends around the horizon, and the absolute density of the stars you can see.”
Phantom seemed to glow brighter as he talked about the experience and Maddie was shocked to see freckles develop across his face, glowing dots in the shape of constellations. His obsession was the stars!
“Of course, Red was chasing me too, so I didn’t get a chance to really enjoy it after I scooped up Technus, so I’ve definitely got to go back someday. You know? Sometime I can actually take some time up there without everything else down here to worry about. But yeah, as long as I take care of that I can get to other things, like foiling Plasmius’ plots to take over the world, or go see a movie. You know?”
“So where do snowball fights fit in there?” Maddie asked.
Phantom froze. “You saw that?”
Maddie nodded.
Phantom shrugged. “That was just babysitting.”
“There was a third ghost. A younger one.”
“Depends on how you count age,” Phantom said.
“He was a pirate,” Maddie said.
That surprised Phantom. “You’ve been paying attention,” he said. “But he’s a cowboy now.”
“He- changed?”
“We do that,” Phantom said.
They’d created a snowman army.
“You shouldn’t be standing so long with only one crutch,” Phantom said. He swooped over to where she’d dropped the second one and brought it to her. Maddie put away her blaster and took the other crutch.
“Why take Danny to the Ghost Zone if you care about protecting the town?”
Phantom shrugged. “Ghost battles are dangerous for everyone. Danny’s trying to make fewer of them.”
Why had her boy taken so much onto his own shoulders in secret?
“He’s still too young for the Ghost Zone,” Maddie said. “You should take me next time.”
Phantom’s jaw dropped. “You want me to take you to the Ghost Zone?”
“I think I have a lot to learn,” Maddie said.
“Huh,” Phantom said. “After that comes off, though.” He gestured towards her cast.
“After that, yes,” Maddie said.
“And we’re not hunting?”
“No hunting,” Maddie said. “Maybe some samples.”
Phantom laughed, like he was having trouble believing where the conversation had gone. Just like Maddie was half convinced she was going to wake up any minute.
“So my molecules will be safe?”
Molecule by molecule.
“Safe from me,” Maddie said.
He held out his hand and Maddie shook it. A moment later a mist came out of Phantom’s mouth, and off in the distance some sort of commotion was starting.
“Gotta fly,” Phantom said, taking off.
Maddie went back downstairs, grabbing the packet from Danny’s room before heading down to the living room to wait for her son to come home. She had some reading to do and she was assuming he wasn’t going to have a ride up to the roof.
It was an hour and a half later that he walked in through the door with a milkshake from the Nasty Burger.
“A bit after curfew,” Maddie said.
“You promised not to get mad,” Danny said, shrugging.
“I was scared for you.”
“So you poached my guide to the Ghost Zone?”
“So I did,” Maddie said. Danny talked to ghosts.
“You believe me, then?” Danny asked. “About ghosts? It isn’t just Phantom, I promise.”
“I think I have a lot more to learn about ghosts,” Maddie said.
Danny frowned.
“Yes, sweetie, I believe you.”
Danny beamed at her, and he looked relieved. Maddie held out her arms, and Danny came over and stooped down to give her a hug.
“Sit down,” Maddie said, patting the couch cushion next to her. “We have more we need to talk about.”
“I have so much to tell you,” Danny said, settling down next to her. “There’s a lot more you should know before you go in there.”
“I’m sure there is,” Maddie said. “But I want you to tell me what’s happening at school.”
Danny stiffened next to her. “Nothing’s going on,” he said. “I mean, you know, ghosts and stuff take up a lot of time, I guess you can probably figure out that I’ve been getting involved in ghost stuff one way or another when they show up.”
“But it’s more than that,” Maddie said. “You said something about the accident.”
Danny stayed silent for a bit.
“You know how the turkey came back to life last thanksgiving?” Danny asked.
“We’re not blaming this on ghosts,” Maddie said. “Not just ghosts. Or turkeys.”
“Just, listen okay? The turkey came back to life.”
Maddie cocked her head to the side. “Well, the turkey didn’t come back to life in any strict sense of the word.”
“But it reanimated. Ectoplasm can reanimate dead things. What about the brain?”
“Well, even if that turkey had had its head, it would have been too long for the ectoplasm to reanimate anything worth reanimating.”
“So what if it was right after the turkey had died?”
Maddie shook her head. “The reanimation process takes too long. The brain deteriorates quickly and anything that was reanimated wouldn’t really be- well it wouldn’t be the same turkey.”
“What if the ectoplasm was supercharged?”
Maddie had a sudden thought. It was a ridiculous thought, but still her heart started pounding in her chest. It was impossible, but what did she know about impossible anymore?
“Hypothetically,” Maddie said. “It would work faster. Probably a lot faster.” A shot in the dark, the preferable option. “You’ve been trying to find a medical application for our research. Your father and I have been talking to a doctor in Norway, there might be something there, but what you’re talking about, the body wouldn’t last long.”
“You’re right,” Danny said. “The body can’t regulate ectoplasm, even though it’s now dependent on it.”
He had such a strong grasp on this. He was so smart and clearly passionate about this. He needed to balance this with his schoolwork, though. She could help him with this, too. At least it wasn’t-
“What if a ghost core formed when you were dead, though?” Danny asked.
Maddie froze, because that had nothing to do with medical research. She reached out and took his hand.
“Sweetie, where were you when the portal activated?”
“What if a ghost core formed, and you were bathed in super charged ectoplasm, in the middle of a graviton vortex?”
“Danny-“
“They’d fuse together,” Danny said. “Then you’d have a ghost core to regulate the ectoplasm in the body.”
He was always setting off their sensors.
“You were dead, but then your heart starts pumping, and your synapses are firing, but you’re something more now. You’d be a hybrid,” Danny said.
“You’re sharing your body with a ghost,” Maddie said. With his own ghost.
Danny shook his head. “It’s not sharing, it’s blending. Everything adapts and works together. The ghost core formed from the brain, it’s still synced, they work together. It isn’t two consciousnesses, it’s one, like the left brain and right brain working together. Just, maybe not the same way it used to. Maybe some things are easier now. Maybe you can wrap your head around concepts like four dimensional space and flight mechanics like it’s just arithmetic. Maybe some things get harder. Like linear thinking, like reading, like keeping track of time, like keeping track of which question you’re supposed to be answering.”
“It sounds like that would make getting your schoolwork done a lot harder,” Maddie said.
“Yeah, it probably would.”
“Danny-“
“So maybe I died a little bit,” Danny said. “But I’m still here.”
Maddie pulled him into a hug. “Of course you are, you’re still my baby. I just need to understand.”
“No,” Danny said.
“What?”
“No experiments,” Danny said.
“Of course no experiments,” Maddie soothed. “I just need to make sure you’re healthy.”
“I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been terrified of what you’d do if you found out,” Danny said. “You’ve described it too often.”
“Danny we were never talking about you,” Maddie said.
“Yes, you were,” Danny said, pulling away. “Pretty funny you didn’t want me going into the Ghost Zone, so you asked me to take you to the Ghost Zone.”
“Danny what-“
“Imagine me wearing my hazmat suit,” Danny said. “Now invert the colors.”
Maybe he’s hard to classify.
“You’re Phantom,” she gasped.
Danny nodded.
She’d shot at him, she’d cursed at him, and she’d threatened to do unspeakable things to him.
“I’ve already had samples taken, I’ve already had tests run, you’re not the only ghost hunters in town, and I’ve had plenty of time to imagine what it would be like if you and Dad took me down to the basement. I just can’t.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Danny said. “Just, I’m fine. Okay? It’s been months, and I haven’t fallen over dead. I’m perfectly healthy. So you don’t need to worry about that.”
“Danny, I’m- I’m sorry.”
Danny shrugged. “You didn’t know.”
“I didn’t listen. You’ve been going through all of this alone.”
“No, I haven’t,” Danny said. “Did you think Sam and Tucker were going to let me do this by myself? Jazz saw me transform into Phantom ages ago. They’ve been helping me. Seriously, I wouldn’t have lasted this long without them.”
“The both of you have gotten too good at keeping secrets from me,” Maddie said.
Danny snorted. “So are we still on for the Ghost Zone?” he asked.
Did it matter that he was an incredibly powerful ghost?
“I don’t know,” Maddie said.
“I could bring ghosts here, if you promised not to shoot them,” Danny said.
“We’ll work something out,” Maddie said. “Like we’ll work something out with the school.”
“I’m fine,” Danny said. “I’m working on it. What’re you going to do? Tell them I can’t read the board because I’m half ghost?”
“We can tell them you have dyslexia,” Maddie said.
“Does NASA take dyslexic astronauts?” Danny asked.
“I don’t know,” Maddie said. “I know they don’t take people who flunk out of high school.”
Danny sighed.
“You just told me you’ve been to space.”
“Yeah, that was cool. But it’s not the same as being in the program.”
What would an obsession with the stars do to him in the long run?
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Maddie said. “I’m sure your sister already has something planned out.”
“Yeah, probably,” Danny said.
“Come on,” Maddie said. “Phantom’s been seen out fighting ghosts way after your curfew. I think it’s time you went to bed.”
“You don’t have questions?” Danny asked.
“I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start. Let’s sleep on it.”
Danny nodded. He stood and then helped her up. He hugged her, and then headed to the stairs.
“What about Dad?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Do you want to tell him?”
“I’ve wanted to tell you both forever,” Danny said. “I didn’t keep this from you because it was a fun secret to keep.”
“We both love you very much,” Maddie said.
“I never knew if you loved me more than you hated ghosts.”
“What about now?” Maddie asked as Danny climbed the stairs.
“I don’t know,” Danny said, climbing out of her sight. “I think you stopped hating ghosts.”
“Okay,” Danny said. “What’s the first rule of the Ghost Zone?”
“Don’t forget to bring emergency fudge,” Dad said.
“We decided that that was rule number five, dear,’ Mom said. “Don’t worry Danny, we won’t ask anyone what their obsession is or how they died.”
The month since he had come out to his mom had been… weird. Dad had been excited that Danny had become a ghost hunter ‘like his old man.’ Mom had been asking questions non-stop. She wanted him to help develop new protocols for investigating ghosts, and Danny had taken to sprinkling in tidbits of his adventures building up to the more outlandish ones. Last night he’d casually brought up the feminist coup Sam had managed in a ghost kingdom.
“Do you have your lunch?” Danny asked. “The food in Mattingly is very good, but I’m pretty sure you can’t eat it.” He hadn’t yet told them that he was a Knight there, so that should be amusing.
“Who do you think you’re asking?” Dad asked, pointing to a picnic basket at the back of the speeder.
“Do you have your homework?”
“Yes, Mom,” Danny said.
“We can go over flashcards on the way,” Jazz said.
School had been… different. He had a 504 plan now, and some kids gave him crap for that, but he’d been getting crap for everything long before that, so who really cared? Besides, Danny had tested himself into a place in the advanced physics class next year, and he was actually passing his classes but… it was still school.
“Is this family of Ghost Zone explorers ready to get the show on the road?” Dad asked.
“Sure,” Danny said. “Just let me… Going ghost!” He transformed. Just because he’d mapped out the safest route, didn’t mean he wasn’t going in ready for trouble.
“That’s my boy!” Dad said before punching the throttle forward.
He was still getting used to the new normal, and he was still trying to reconcile Phantom with the shard of himself that had become Dan with the hero who could end a ghost in the blink of an eye, and the boy who wanted to be an Astronaut. He wasn’t doing it alone though.