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Beneath them, the growing earthquake caused the tall building of the control centre to wobble. The building began to moan and creak, and the people inside screamed and ran for the ladder.

"Wait!" Jack bellowed. "Everybody stay inside the control centre!" He tried to block the exit but the other strangers overcome with fear, shoved him out of the way.

"Jack!" Maddie ran to her husband but a violent shake tripped her up and threw her over to Tucker's console, where she hit her head on the bottom. She sat up, dazed, rubbing her head.

Jazz saw this, then got on her hands and knees and crawled towards her father.

"Dad!" Jazz helped him to a sitting position. "Come on! We gotta go!"

"No, Jazz, we have to get those people back up here!"

"Are you crazy?" Jazz winced as she heard a crack downstairs. "This thing could fall over any second!"

"Darling." Maddie's hand was on Jazz's back. "The control station can detach to form an aircraft."

"Oh." Jazz blinked, and in that time Jack had already stood up. He quickly threw off the warm coat he was wearing and pressed something on his jumpsuit. The chest section inflated to form a life jacket.

"Tucker! Maddie!" Jack barked, somewhat awkwardly shoving himself down the small ladder chute. "Prepare the Fento-copter! Set a course for Amity Park! Fire her up when the tower tilts over fifteen degrees!"

"On it!" Tucker began typing away. Beside him, Maddie pulled a lever that hung from the ceiling, bringing up an entirely new set of controls from the floor.

Jazz frowned. "But... what about you, dad? What if it tilts before you get back?"

Jack locked eyes with his daughter. "Then save yourselves." With that simple statement, he managed to force himself through the opening and out of sight.

"Dad!" Jazz reached her hand out to him, but then she composed herself. She turned to Tucker and Maddie, who were manning the controls. "Is there anything I can do?"

A shudder rocked the tall control centre, and Maddie stabbed a button. Metal bars bent in a U shape came out of the floor of the ship and locked her and Tucker's feet to the ground. Jazz was less lucky and tumbled back onto the floor.

"What, darling?" Maddie called without turning around. "Look out of the window and see if you can locate Jack!"

Jazz quickly complied, somewhat nervously approaching the glass. From a crouching position she observed the icy terrain below. She saw thirteen dark spots fleeing the dangerous frozen lake, which she assumed to be the twelve other strangers who had been aboard and one Jack trying to chase them down. Most of them made a beeline for the higher ground – much of which was dangerously avalanching from the awful earthquake - but one was running over to the hole where Danny's ship had sunk in.

She watched as cracks in the ice extending out from the unstable control centre, carved up the land below. The one person by Danny's ship had already been overwhelmed and was hopelessly floating in the freezing lake whilst the other twelve were rapidly losing ground, still a while away from the edge.

Wait, Jazz frowned as a thought struck her. Which one was Jack?

"Blast wave incoming!" Maddie shouted from behind.

Her question was answered almost immediately as an orange figure came into view, charging across the splintered ice towards the one stranded figure by Danny's ship.

Then there was a sudden force, like a tremor, that pushed the control tower almost the entire way over. Jazz's face banged right into the glass and she stared in helpless terror as the ground raced up to meet them.

"Activating emergency thrusters!" Tucker shouted, and smashed the glass surrounding a scary-looking red button. The sound of a jet engine roared below them for a brief second and before they knew it, the three of them were spinning around in their small little control pod, a long way from the ground.

Jazz had never wanted to throw up so much in her life as she hung desperately to the window and could only watch the clouds whirling around and around and around until they became one single nauseating light. She shut her eyes but only found the sensation got worse.

And then they tilted, and began falling back to Earth like yet another meteorite. Jazz couldn't turn her head but she could use her voice.

"What's going on over there?" Jazz called out in an unusually high-pitched voice. "Do something!"

"We're on it!" Maddie answered as they continued falling. As the pod spun uncontrollably in the air, Jazz could only catch glimpses of the rapidly approaching blue sea they were falling into.

At that point, a deafening helicopter sound started up from the top of the pod, and they began to stabilise. Jazz blinked, and then she smiled in relief.

"You got it working?" Jazz turned around to see Maddie sitting in a chair with some very specialised-looking controls surrounding her. Tucker was struggling to remove his feet from where they had been anchored by metal poles.

"We did it!" Maddie pressed a button on the console which brought the sound of the helicopter blades right down. She took a second to grin at Jazz but then turned back to the controls. "Now, we have to get Jack."

Jazz's smile dropped from her face. "Dad. Do you think he'll be alright?"

"I'm sure Mr Fenton will be fine, Jazz." Tucker walked over to her wearing only socks; he had left his shoes where they had been secured. "Nothing short of an apocalypse would stop him- oh, yeah."

"Speaking of an apocalypse." Maddie spoke as the helicopter they were flying descended towards the 'ground'.

I phrase the word that way because when Jazz rushed to look out of the window, all she could see was water for miles, a vast empty blue sea. She gasped.

"Where are they?" Jazz frowned, scanning the water. "What happened?"

"Water displacement, is my best guess." Maddie bit her lip. "The heat from that blast wave must somehow have been hot enough to melt all the ice."

"Somehow?" Tucker asked.

"Let me put it this way: if the blast wave was that hot, none of us would have survived." She began flying upwards again.

"Wait, what are you doing?" Jazz turned. "We need to look for Dad!"

Maddie opened her mouth, and then she closed it again. She swallowed tightly.

"You're not giving up on him, are you?"

"As much... as I'd like to admit there is a chance that anybody down there survived..." Maddie started slowly. "The truth is there is no chance. What we need to do now is get to Amity Park and repair the Ghost Portal so that any survivors can escape into the Ghost Zone."

"No survivors?" Jazz challenged. "Then what's that orange thing over there?"

"Orange thing?" Tucker frowned. Then his eyes widened. "Oh, yeah! I see it!"

"See what? Is it Jack?" Maddie instinctively lowered right to the ground.

They had descended quite close to where the orange figure was, so by the time they had pointed him out to Maddie Jack – for it was he – had swum up to the window. There was another person held in one of his arms, the face obscured.

Maddie had Tucker drop the ladder, and in a matter of seconds it became taut with weight. One hand reached up and pushed an unconscious body onto the floor, then Jack himself squeezed through.

"Dad!" Jazz skipped over and hugged him, feeling her clothes dampening by the second. "I was so worried for you!"

"I'm happy to be back, princess. Watch out – you're getting wet!"

"I don't care." Jazz answered. Jack hesitated, then wrapped his daughter in a cold, wet, happy hug.

"Jack." Maddie activated the autopilot and rushed over to join the hug. "I thought you'd... I thought..."

Jazz's eyes opened, and she detached from the hug. Hadn't her mother just wanted to leave him to drown a few minutes ago?

"It's okay, Maddie." Jack held his wife in a tight embrace, rocking her slightly from side to side. "It's gonna be okay. We're all gonna be okay."

"Hey, who's this?" Tucker attracted Jazz's attention. He was kneeling by the face-down body of a thin black-haired person.

Jazz gently grasped a shoulder and rolled the unconscious body over, and stared into the face of Sam.