After her surprisingly successful session questioning Phantom, Maddie had started to look at the ghosts plaguing Amity Park with different eyes. Sure, she still believed they were a menace and could not be trusted, but they weren't inherently evil and hell-bent on destroying the city, at least not all of them. She had begun to observe them as people, instead of human behavior patterns and emotions imprinted on ectoplasm. They still weren't people, oh no, but Maddie had found her daughter's way of studying ghosts fruitful.
The more human-like ghosts had personalities, traits, and mannerisms, though not to the same extent as humans. And Phantom, as Maddie had to keep reminding herself. Phantom really was something different entirely.
His personality had more sides to it than any other ghost, he had more detail in his appearance, and he was more powerful than almost anything coming through the portal. He was an enigma, one Maddie had tried to solve almost since his first appearance. At least now, she had more information about him than ever before: her notes and observations from their session.
Currently, Maddie was leafing through said notes for the umpteenth time within a week. She was comparing them to notes she had made of other commonly reappearing ghosts, such as the one claiming to be 'The Box Ghost' and the metallic hunter ghost known as 'Skulker'. None of the other ghosts showed signs of being 'portalborns', as she had decided to call Phantom and any other possible ghost that might have died in similar conditions.
Maddie paused her page skimming to a leaf with an attempt of drawing Phantom's face in detail to help her remember more later when transcribing her notes on a computer. She hadn't, she'd been busy. While the drawing wasn't good in any way, it gave her an idea.
Ghosts had been people once. People left records behind when they died. Phantom couldn't have died more than eleven years ago, which would make him ridiculously overpowered comparing to his age, but he had apparently died in a portal similar to the Fenton portal. According to Phantom, someone else had stolen their blueprints for the portal, and since the blueprints had existed in complete form for twelve years now and Maddie couldn't possibly imagine anyone, even with a professional and well-equipped team, building one in less than a year, eleven years was the maximum time she believed was possible for another portal to have existed.
That roughly translated into there being a possibility of finding Phantom's records from when he was alive.
Maddie almost leaped out of the office chair she was sitting in the lab, the very same she had questioned Phantom from a week earlier, and into a far less comfortable one in front of a computer with enough exposed wires to make her lose custody of her children if child services ever found it. Of course, Jazz was beyond legal drinking age and Danny too was technically an adult, so the threat of losing her children because of a computer was almost on the negative.
Despite its suspicious appearance, the computer was fast and well-connected. After a few lessons of 'handling the internet for those born before the 90's' in the library later, so was Maddie in her research as her fingers glided over the keyboard. Despite her efficiency, the sheer amount of male teenagers either dead or missing from a few state area between the last eleven and five years was massive. Judging by the somewhat local accent Maddie had picked up from the ghost's echoing voice, he couldn't have been from any further than Michigan, though her hypothesis was Wisconsin, since that particular state had slightly more ghost activity than the other surrounding states, and Phantom couldn't possibly have died in their portal. She and Jack would've known if someone died in their portal. And while Phantom hadn't exactly said it, he had heavily implied it was somewhere else.
After an all-nighter of going through death reports and missing person announcements, Maddie was no closer to finding Phantom's original identity. She buried her face in her hands, black latex gloves discarded on the table next to an empty coffee cup. She had read every single article she had found fitting her search, and after she had run out of those, she had excluded gender from her search. Not everybody's identities necessarily match the gender the news reported their deaths as.
Maddie decided to seek out Phantom again, but not before getting a good day's sleep. She needed to be well awake to find the ever-elusive ghost who, while appearing at all times of the day, was in general more active during night time like all ghosts tended to be and thus more easily found then. Of course, had Maddie been less tired she would've been out of the house chasing the monochrome specter in the blink of an eye but as it was, she collected her coffee-stained mug and trudged up the lab stairs with heavy feet. Once in the kitchen, she was surprised to see her son sitting on the table, nursing his own cup of apparently iced coffee and looking as lively as one could describe a disgruntled chameleon being. Maddie glanced at the clock on the wall. Six a.m.
"Are you alright sweetie?" Maddie couldn't help asking. Her son was often up and about at absurd times of night, but he was scowling into his coffee way more than usual, and his nightly adventures around the house tended to happen before three. Danny just nodded glumly. "Yeah. Just woke up too early and hit my foot."
Maddie absentmindedly patted his shoulder on her way to the sink. She didn't feel like washing the cup and despite showing bad example to her son, left it there unwashed and headed upstairs.
The night came, and Maddie was ready and prepared to spend all of it following the glowing dots on her ghost detector's screen. She had modified it some time ago so it should display Phantom's dot red instead of green, since he had a distinguishably different frequency than other ghosts. While this often made tracking him easier, the signature was closer to the background electromagnetic energy of the city power grid than any other ghost and Phantom seemed to use this to his advantage to disappear from her radar, sometimes completely without a trace. Maddie hoped Phantom would refrain from pulling his usual Houdini tonight.
She turned on her ghost radar as she stepped out of the front door, and as if her prayers had been answered, the red dot was circling a green one not even three blocks away. She quickly locked the door behind her and burst into a sprint towards the commotion she could hear already.
Two turns and equally many blocks further, there was Phantom in all his monochrome glory, taunting what looked like an anthropomorphous black mammoth. Maddie promptly decided to turn a deaf ear to whatever he would say to the mammoth ghost during the fight. Phantom's awful puns were even more famous than the grin Maddie had seen up close, and while there was a possibility of them giving her some insight on the ghost, willingly listening to Phantom's puns was not something she'd ever subject herself to. Instead, she kept a close eye on him the entire time he and the mammoth traded punches, crackling-with-energy ectobeams and –projectiles and unsurprisingly one-sided insults.
As the show went on almost directly Maddie's head, she had a front row seat. She rarely saw Phantom fight this close. All the times she had, she had joined in guns blazing trying to capture both ghosts, but she had to admit that watching the uninterrupted flow of two beings unbothered by the laws of physics fight was truly fascinating. Maddie only wished she'd brought her notepad with her.
There was a sudden halt in the fight. Both sides floated in place a few dozen feet above the otherwise empty street, facing each other. Had they been alive, Maddie would've bet they'd be panting heavily. As Maddie was expecting a full frontal attack from either or both sides, Phantom surprised her by instead speaking to the other ghost. Maddie almost tuned him out again before realizing he wasn't speaking English anymore. Come to think of it, nothing after the opening insults had been. Now she regretted not bringing the ghost gabber with her; despite the gadget's passive-aggressive 'personality' it was a useful tool.
Now the black mammoth was answering to Phantom, its voice low and guttural, and judging by the human-like ghost's reaction Maddie was sure they were back to insults, this time from both sides.
It was entertaining to watch even though the scientist could not understand the words. Phantom mimicked the mammoth's animalistic manners to add juice to his verbal blows, flashed his eyes, and flared his aura, before the mammoth suddenly shrunk back and zoomed over Maddie to the direction she had come from. A wave of panic washed through her: he children were in that direction. She turned around and was ready to sprint back as fast as her legs could carry her, but an echoing voice from behind her stopped her.
"Let her go, she's just going back to the Zone."
Maddie whipped back around to face the street behind her and almost head-butted Phantom, who had apparently been trying to put a gloved hand on her shoulder. She barely restrained herself from blasting the ghost in the face with the wrist ray she had taken with her.
"Phantom!" she gasped. "Never sneak up on a ghost hunter!"
Phantom merely smirked apologetically in return. "Never killed me before." he let out a small noise that might count as a laugh at his comment. "So, what's up? It's the second time you've not shot me on sight and last time you dragged me to your lab."
Maddie watched as the ghost flew in a slow circle around her, unnaturally large eyes glowing with curiosity. It was fascinating, the way his temper made a one-eighty from threatening to cat-like curiosity in a span of a few seconds.
"I'm here to 'drag you back'," she finally answered with air quotes after Phantom had circled her four times. "Our... conversation left me with almost more questions than answers."
Phantom stopped his circling her and struck a stereotypical thinking pose. "I could do that," he said almost to himself, "if we agreed on a truce. I don't shoot you, you don't shoot me kind of deal. Not that I shoot you anyways..." the ghost trailed off with a shrug. "I'll let you study me if you promise not to shoot or otherwise harm me. No experiments though, I hate those."
A truce with a ghost, not to mention the infamous and elusive Phantom? It might end badly, he was a ghost after all, but it would further their ghost research a lot if it worked out. Shooting had gotten her nowhere in almost five years. What the hell, she thought and nodded.
"So... Truce?" Phantom offered her his hand, its glove's white color pronounced by the ethereal white glow. Maddie looked up from the hand. Phantom was smiling. It wasn't the usual cheeky grin, but a genuine yet excited and determined smile, the row of his pearly white sharp teeth-nearing-fangs splitting his face in half. Maddie slowly took hold of the offered hand and manager to refrain from pulling it back as Phantom engulfed their handshake in green fire that didn't burn her hand, his excited smile widening beyond human capabilities. "Truce," she repeated, voice satisfyingly tremble-free. This was not how she had expected her ghost chase to go, but she would take what she could.
