Danny dumped his backpack onto the floor, then attempted to collapse onto his bed, exhausted from another long, boring day at school.
"Cuz! You're squishing me!"
The boy yelped, jumping back up and spinning on his heel to see a black haired girl sitting at the head, smirking at him as she lowered the space magazine she'd been reading.
"Danielle, you have got to stop doing that! You're gonna scare me to death one of these days. And… is that mine?"
"Uh huh. Your parents left the new issue on your desk. You weren't here, and I was bored, so I figured I'd flip through it."
Danny resisted the urge to slap his cousin upside the head, instead just pinching the bridge of his nose. "What're you even doing here? I thought you had something going on today anyway."
She nodded, leaning forward excitedly. "Uh huh! I've got a class today. But… I was hoping, maybe, if you weren't too busy, you could… come along with me? Cause, it's sounds really fun; we're gonna do anatomy. And you said you were doing that in school too, so I thought…" Dani trailed off, smiling at him hopefully.
It was impossible to resist those puppy dog eyes. Danny knew that she knew perfectly well that if she asked like this, her cousin would do anything she wanted to. And she was right; they had just been doing an anatomy lesson in science class. Which had elicited another protest from animal rights activist Sam, who still thought dissecting frogs was unethical. The dark haired boy grimaced slightly at the chaos that had caused at school. At least no ghosts had shown up, for once. Well, other than Dani.
"Yeah, ok. Let me just call Tuck and Sam quick, and grab something to eat. Then we'll go… wait. Where are your lessons, anyway?"
She gave him an amused glance. "Ghost Zone. Duh. All my teachers are ghosts."
"Oh. Right." It had taken more than a couple of favors, and several very long talks with Dani, to find some form of education that she'd actually go to. The girl still staunchly refused to just meet his parents and come live with him and go to a normal school. After much persuasion, she had finally agreed to meet Jazz, who was helping homeschool her a little. But Jazz couldn't do everything, which left only one other resource: the Ghost Zone. Fortunately, despite their animosity towards Danny, Danielle had managed to make herself a quite a few friends among the ghosts, and so that had been a relatively simple task.
"C'mon! I gotta pick something up from your school before we go, and I don't wanna be late!" She said as she jumped off the bed, snapping him out of his thoughts.
"Wait, what? What do you need from my school?"
She giggled. "You were cutting up frogs, right? I'm supposed to bring one with me. We're gonna compare ghost and animal anatomy."
The teen's frown deepened as he trailed slightly behind his clone, who was zipping through the swirling green expanse of the Ghost Zone, plastic bag clutched in her gloved hand. He recognized this route, and wasn't too happy with the thought of where they were going.
"Hey, Dani? Are you sure this is the right direction?"
"Uh huh. And you've asked that like 20 times. What's the problem?"
"… who exactly is your teacher today?"
"Welp! You dare to come into my territory? You are either very brave, or very stupid. Either way, you have brought the hunt to me, and at last, I will –"
Skulker's rant was cut short by a metallic rap on the top of his head. "Stop it. I told you I was gonna try to bring him with today. That doesn't mean you're allowed to try and skin him or whatever. We're doing frogs, not my cousin."
"But –"
Another clang. "I'll tell Ember if you don't quit it."
"But –"
Danny took the distraction to fire an ectoblast at the hunter ghost, only to be shocked when a green bubble formed around him, and the attack backfired, slamming right into his chest. "Danny! Seriously? He's my teacher; you can't just blast him!"
Two pairs of green eyes turned to stare at her, then met each other in disbelief. Back and forth. Then the protests started.
"But I've been hunting him for so long – "
"Dani you can't get lessons from him he's been trying to mount my pelt on his wall for months –"
"The ghost child is the ultimate prey –"
"I swear I'm never going to let you –"
"STOP!" She yelled, the soundwave echoing louder than it ought to have in such an open space. Both of the others moved backwards a little, involuntarily. "You two start fighting, and I'm gonna call Valerie on both of you. And tell Sam and Ember. So quit it. I wanna cut up frogs."
Skulker and Danny looked at each other, their expression mirror images of shock and mild fear. Danielle's threats were too serious to be ignored, especially considering that both knew that Valerie would be more than happy to hunt them both down, and that both girlfriends would sit with the young half ghost. "Truce?"
"Truce."
"Good. Now come on. Skulker, did you catch the frog thingy you said you were gonna get?"
"Of course. I am, after all, the greatest hunter in the Ghost Zone. Capturing a mere frog was hardly –"
"You're the only hunter in the Ghost Zone, and I don't care how easy it was. I got the human world frog. Let's go cut them up!" She darted off in the direction of his house, within his hunting ground lair.
Skulker shot a glare at Phantom. "As soon as she is not around, ghost child, your hide will be mine!"
Danny rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. How'd Dani rope you into teaching her anatomy, anyway? That seems a little… unlike you."
"Uh… well, she and Ember have been hanging out, a lot, and the topic came up, and suddenly… well… it's really not important. The sooner we're finished, the better." And with that, the ghost started off after the rapidly shrinking Danielle.
"Man. I have got to ask her how she does this." Danny muttered to himself, before trailing along afterwards. His cousin's ability to get people to like her was unparalleled.
"So, I just take the knife, and cut it along here, and open it up?" Dani asked, looking back and forth between the two frogs pinned to the board. "Pretty much." Danny replied, as Skulker nodded. The girl bit her lip, and made the two insisions, carefully and slowly. She didn't want to mess this lesson up; she'd been looking forward to it for too long.
"And then just… pin it back… whoa. Awesome." Her green eyes widened as she peered into the guts of the first frog, the one stolen from Danny's classroom. She poked a lung with her knife, grinning in fascination. "That's so cool. It's like… there's all kinds of different bits in here! What are they?"
"This one's yours, ghost child. I don't know a thing about the insides of creatures in your world."
"Um… so that thing's the heart, I think. Then two lungs, and the liver, and the bladder…"
"So if I push on it, can I make the frog pee?"
Danny pinched the bridge of his nose. "I dunno. Maybe. I can't say we really… tried that." He gave Skulker a glance that very clearly said Why did we agree to teach her this stuff?
Skulker raised an eyebrow. Don't ask me. She's your cousin.
"So… can I do the ghost one now? I wanna see if they're the same."
"Uh… yeah. Sure. Whatever."
The girl blew a loose strand of hair out of her face, then repeated the procedure on the second specimen. "Down the center, across the legs and throat… open up the flaps… pin it back….Oh, sweet. Danny, look at this! It's like… still alive!"
The boy made the mistake of looking at what she was pointing to. Sure enough, unlike the ghost from the human realm, the ghostly amphibian's heart-like structure was still beating. His face paled, then went a faint shade of rose. "U-uh… that's great, Dani…"
"Well, of course it's still functioning. If you stop a ghost's core, even in such a meager creature as this, it instantly begins to melt into pure ectoplasm. Surely, you were aware of this?"
"Nuh uh. That's weird. But I guess it kinda makes sense… I mean, a core looks just like a heart. And if you stop that, than things die in the human world."
Danny tried to look at anything but that still-beating core, but his eyes kept sliding back, as if it were a terrible car crash instead of a little frog. His stomach clenched, and he swallowed hard, trying to keep his lunch down.
"Whoa! And look, if you poke this…" She touched something else inside the frog's chest, and it made a gurgling sound, twitching on the plate. That was it. Phantom ran outside, and began to hurl.
Dani frowned at the noise, glancing behind her at him, and then back to Skulker. "Um… is he ok?"
A smirk lifted the corner of the ghost's mouth. "It would seem that the welp is rather squeamish, when it comes to ghostly biology. Yet you seem perfectly fine."
"Well, yeah. This stuff is way cool…"
Danny groaned as he flopped down onto his bed. Another long tedious day at school. And it had had the added benefit of being the full dissection day. Sam had stormed out of the classroom, Tucker had thought it funny to electrocute his frog with some new PDA attachment, which had resulted in a foul smell and a twitching specimen, and Danny had eventually left as well, as he kept dry heaving. The thought of Dani's experiments the evening previous still made him nauseous, and the frogs today had been far too similar for comfort. He gagged again at the mental image of that beating heart…
"Hiya, cuz!"
The boy yelped, turned partially intangible, and fell off the bed, which sent his cousin into a fit of giggled.
"Darn it, Danielle! Can you not do that?"
"Aww, c'mon, Danny. It was funny."
"Whatever. What do you want?"
"Well… you kinda didn't look so good yesterday. I… wanted to make sure you were ok." She said, biting her lip. "Are you doing better?"
He sighed. "Yeah, more or less. It's just… I don't know how you find that stuff cool. It's really gross."
"Yeah, but it's also really interesting. I mean, the fact that ghosts melt when their core is wonky? That's what used to happen to me. So maybe that's what that stuff your dad made did to me; make my core stable, or something. And there's other interesting stuff too: at least in the frogs, all the guts and stuff are almost the same. But there's some different stuff, so knowing that might help if either of us get sick. Cause I dunno if it'll be more like human or more like ghost."
"Huh. I guess… if you look at it that way, it is kinda neat."
"Uh huh." She smiled at him, blue eyes bright. "So… you're alright?"
"Yeah, cuz. I am."
"Good. Because guess what?"
"What?"
Her smile turned devious, and before he had a chance to react, she pulled the Fenton thermos out of her hoodie pocket and uncapped it. "Ghost frog!"
The boy's high pitched scream and her burst of laughter filled the otherwise quiet house. Just another typical night at Fentonworks.