It's really interesting setting aside your own view of the world to get into the head of a character and figure out what theirs might be. Hopefully it worked here. I think this could be something Danny comes up with. He has his deep moments, so yeah, get ready to ponder the mysteries of eternity for a minute or two. :)

(and yes, of course that's a reference to Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy; you can't talk about the big questions without throwing in a "42" somewhere!)

42

July 30, 2013

Jazz knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. She didn't really think that she should have waited, that Danny could be in the middle of something he didn't want her to see (he was her younger brother, for Pete's sake, by now she had seen it all the weirdness his half-ghost teenage boy brain could devise). Of course, it wouldn't be anything bad, but he did have a penchant for hiding every single little cut and scrape he got while fighting ghosts from her and if she walked in on him while performing full-blown first aid, she realized she didn't know how either one of them would respond.

But she just had a question to ask him and when she didn't hear him yell at her to stay out, she didn't think further about waiting before entering.

Which made her pause when Danny, who was sitting on his bed, suddenly shuffled around and tried to hide a thick book from her view and pull out some mismatched pages of homework to make it look like he had been doing something else. Besides the fact that she had actually seen him move everything around, the fact that his math was upside-down and paired with a history study guide would have clued her into the fact that this wasn't what he had on his mind.

Danny looked up at her a little startled, obviously not having expected her to walk in just then. "Um…" he smoothly recovered. "What was it that you wanted, Jazz?"

She wasn't looking at him, however, but straining to read the title of the book he had moved aside and not hidden very well.

Jazz moved to stare at Danny when she realized what the book was and he returned her gaze, growing a little bashful. The silence grew a little long and uncomfortable until Jazz snapped out of it.

"Oh, uh, nothing…" she began, "nothing really…" she fiddled first with her hands and when they couldn't stay still, she began twirling a strand of red hair around a finger. "I just had a question, but it really doesn't…" she stopped her frantic tirade for a moment. They both knew she never had been going at covering up smoothly when she was flustered. Only when her brother's life was on the line.

"You were reading the Bible, Danny?" Her voice went up the scale at the abrupt change in her sentence from stuttering apology to disbelieving observation.

Danny looked at the book behind him and then back at his sister. Well, there wasn't much point in denying it now. "Yeah."

Oh.

In a moment, all of the switches in her head had been thrown into overdrive, coming up with questions, theories, ponderances, and an overall sense of general confusion that she couldn't break past.

Why was her brother…? They'd never been a religious family, never gone to church except for weddings of distant cousins… so… why this, why now?

She suddenly realized that mulling this all over in her mind wouldn't give her any answers. She would need to ask him. But that was easier said than done, since she didn't know what angle from which to approach the issue, what might offend her little brother, or tick him off, of embarrass him so much that he would chase her out of his room.

"And do you…" she fumbled around for what to say, what she was even trying to ask. "What… do you… think about it?"

He smiled at how uncomfortable she appeared. "To be honest, I'm not sure yet." He grinned amusedly, stopping short of a chuckle, however. "You seem surprised."

"Oh!" she protested, trying to downplay the emotions that became more and more obvious the more she tried to deny them. "I'm not… I mean… maybe I am, but not that that's not a good thing… not that it's not necessarily a bad thing either… it's just… I didn't… I mean… with everything… that's happened… since the portal… since you…"

"I get it, Jazz," Danny said, stopping her before her face turned completely red. "I understand what you mean." Jazz's hands stilled and she looked relieved. "Even if you didn't really say anything very clearly…" he chuckled at her expense.

She glared weakly, but not too much because she still didn't want to offend him and she really did want an answer.

"I'm kinda surprised too…" he mused as he looked over to the book again. "I don't know why I picked it up, but I just wanted to see what people said, I guess."

She was confused. "About what?"

"About death."

Oh. She went silent immediately.

"And what's beyond it."

She looked up sharply, an eyebrow quirked. "But surely, you don't believe…"

"I'm not sure what I believe, Jazz." He sighed. "A couple months ago, I certainly didn't believe in ghosts." He smirked softly. "But now I am one… kinda… and that leads to all sorts of questions that I'd never thought to think about before." He looked up at her. "Not even just all this religion and stuff, but what exactly is a ghost?"

Jazz looked at him like he had forgotten what one plus one equaled.

"I know that it sounds like a simple question," he said, answering her look. "But I mean, according to Mom and Dad, ghosts are just projections of ectoplasmic consciences. I don't even fully know what that means, but I know that I'm more than just a pretense at emotion and intelligence. Well…" he smiled, self-deprecatingly, "maybe not the intelligence bit, according to my latest report cards, but you know what I mean."

He put a hand on his chest, assuring himself that his skin was solid and warm. "I'm real and what I feel is real. Same with all of the ghosts I've encountered so far. I mean, Poindexter even took my place at school for a while and no one noticed because he was smart and funny and nice and interacting with people like he was alive. He could get mad but that wasn't the only thing he felt; when he first found out who I was, he was pretty excited. He's fully dead and I could still tell that he kept his human emotions."

Danny sighed. "But are Mom and Dad even right about what a ghost is? They're supposed to be the most knowledgeable people in the country on the paranormal, but what they think about ghosts probably isn't what most people who believe in ghosts think. What about what normal people who don't have scientific jargon explaining what 'white bed sheets that say boo' are? First of all, they're wrong because ghosts obviously aren't all bed sheets or shapeless blobs like you see in movies. Hollywood's got it all wrong, but that's a whole 'nother rant that I'm not going to get into right now."

He smiled his trademark grin, but it soon turned thoughtful. "And don't they all kind of have to be wrong on this question? I mean, being dead is the main qualification for being a ghost- the one thing that everyone agrees on, the common denominator. But look at me!" he said, suddenly looking back up at Jazz.

"I prove that false!" After a short pause, he continued a little less certainly, "I think."

His forehead wrinkled in thought. "Maybe I don't. Maybe I'm just dead enough to qualify for these powers. I don't… I just don't…" he said brokenly, hesitantly. "I don't know what I am, Jazz!" Danny finally exclaimed, his eyes a little dimmed with the enormity of the information not at his fingertips. "I don't know what the portal did to me. I don't know if I'm dead or part-way dead or fully human and still alive but bonded with ghost goop."

He sighed bitterly, "In other words, I don't know if I'm a ghost trying to be a human or a creepy little boy with creepy little powers."

"Danny," Jazz found the need to interrupt her brother's self-debasement. "You're my little brother. You're a human, but I guess you're part ghost too. You have these powers that you're able to use to help everyone. I wouldn't call that creepy."

Danny made his eyes glow neon green and summoned enough energy to make his hand match. "You mean to say that this isn't creepy?" he asked with one eyebrow raised.

"No," Jazz smiled. "I'd say that was pretty cool."

She allowed herself a small, satisfied smirk when Danny began to laugh, taking all traces of his worry away.

When he finally calmed down, he gave her a very heartfelt, "Thanks, Jazz."

"Don't mention it."

"But, getting back to ghosts, and I mean normal ghosts, are they all the spirits of dead people? Was there really someone that obsessed with boxes when he was alive to create the nuisance we all… know and love today? Or does every single bit of previous life that was in any way shape or form obsessed with boxes coalesce to form a ghost whose obsession it is?

"And are ghosts the spirits of all dead people, or just some of them, and if so, what happens to the others? Do they become ghosts in some other realm, or do we just never see them because they don't have obsessions which make them come out of the Ghost Zone? Or if you die without unfinished business, do you just… cease to exist?"

He stared into the wall intently, as if it would give him an answer. "And what happens to half-ghosts like me… are Vlad and I bound by different rules? What happens when we die? Do we stay in our current forms, half-dead when alive and half-alive when dead? Or do we become all ghosts since we've stuck our toes in the door? Or do we vanish out of existence because we've already had our turn at playing ghost?"

Realizing that that was a completely different tangent, he went back to his previous line of inquiry. "But is there nothing left for people after death except for oblivion or an obsession-filled-getting-your-butt-kicked-by-Danny -Phantom kind of existence… or is there some sort of heaven?"

"Is it a separate place or separate plane of existence? Or is it some sort of mythical paradise that no one will ever see in reality. Or is it only as make-believe as ghosts are? Is that what people really mean by Heaven or Hell, the Ghost Zone and the doors in there? Is your lair your reward or punishment?" He thought back to the different lands he had encountered and how happy the spirits inside them seemed. "Does that mean that Klemper was bad and Skulker was good since Klemper never finds anyone to be his friend but Skulker roams through the Ghost Zone and human world collecting rare specimens for his collection at his heart's content?"

Jazz stared at him, almost disbelieving. Never in her life had she thought that Danny, her silly little brother, would be able to think of anything on this deep of a level. He barely passed algebra—how could he be pondering the secrets of God, the universe, and the afterlife like he actually understood what he was talking about?

But he wasn't done yet. "Is there a God? Is He a being that presides over everything from another plane? Is he a mindless force of "destiny"? Or could I find him in the Ghost Zone? Is the supposed God really just a really, really strong ghost who's so powerful that stories of him somehow leaked over to the Human Zone over the years? Is it someone like Pariah Dark who can wield power like no one on earth could imagine?" He broke off here to chuckle weakly to himself. "Was it Pariah? Did I conquer God? Or is God a power that can't be contained here on earth or there in the Ghost Zone…?"

After a moment, "Ergh!" he exclaimed, splaying his hands to try to express the inability he felt when facing questions of this metaphysical magnitude.

"I don't know," he said, running his hands through his hair. "I don't know the answer to anything."

Sighing deeply, he looked up at his sister, whose jaw was still gaping a bit. Then he smiled and with the action, every vestige of the grave philosopher left him and he looked like a fourteen year old again.

"So… back to your original question," he said, looking at her with a raised eyebrow, "I don't know what to think." He shrugged a little sheepishly as he looked at the book and flipped the gold-leafed pages. "But after becoming half-ghost, I have to believe that there's… something… so I'm looking, reading, thinking…"

Jazz sat down at the edge of his bed and laid a hand on his shoulder. He smiled up at her as a faint blush began to creep onto his face.

"Heh. I guess that I sounded a little too much like you right then, didn't I?"

"Naw," she nudged him playfully. "You can never sound too much like me."

"Riiight…" he laughed.

The original 100 word drabble is here: s/7435347/119/Turning-Pages

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