Chapter 4: Reality Trip

"That's because, 'Danny', you died. In the accident when you activated the Portal …"

"Your parents had built some Ghost Portal thing that was supposed to let people see the Ghost Zone. But it didn't work, and you … you tried to fix it." Sam swallowed hard. "And then." She cut herself off abruptly.

Oh.

I was stunned for a few moments, but the idea quickly sank in. Remembering the searing pain of electrocution … yeah. I believed that I could have died, if things had been even slightly different.

It took longer, however, for the implications for everyone else to sink in. Mom and Dad … what had happened to them when I died in their own Fenton Invention? What about Jazz? And the most obvious question smacked me in the face: what about Sam?

Sam had been the one who convinced me to enter the portal in my dimension. Was it the same here? She must have been wracked with guilt! "Sam, I'm so sorry," I said, choking a little.

Sam was silent for a long moment, her face completely impassive. When she finally spoke, it was with quiet conviction. "I killed him. You. You have nothing to be sorry about." She drew in a deep breath and let it out. "I'll ask Ferina about the parallel dimension thing."

"Ferina?" I asked, nonplussed.

Sam hesitated a moment. "Your sister," she said carefully.

"Jazz? Jazz is here?" I asked, almost jumping to my feet. "Where?"

"Keep your voice down!" Sam snapped. "You really must be from another dimension. Stop calling people by their old names."

"What? Why?" I asked, blinking. "Old names?" I was utterly lost.

"Calm down and listen," Sam ordered. She reached behind herself, and I thought for a moment it would be something she wanted to show me, but what emerged was a well-battered first aid kit. She hiked up her skirt without shame; the gash on her thigh that'd I'd all but forgotten about was thick with congealed blood. "For the sake of simplicity, I'll pretend you're telling the truth."

"I am telling the truth," I snapped, but I looked at the wound with a wince. "Let me help with that."

"What do you know about first aid?" Sam smirked. Her voice was mirthless.

"A lot more than you think. Please," I said. "At least let me do something."

Sam gave me a skeptical look, but leaned back slightly, letting me at it.

As a ghost I heal pretty fast, but I have to clean up myself before I change back anyway, just in case I'm still bleeding. Jazz showed me how to make tourniquets and clean gashes once she knew what I was up to, so I can take care of my own messes. Working on Sam's thigh was different, but not that different; I started with a wet wipe, swiping away most of the congealed blood.

"Ow. Be careful," Sam said.

After you fought Technus and trudged around in sewers with this, you think a little alcohol is painful? I thought. "Okay," I said aloud.

Sam nodded slightly when I glanced up at her, and she seemed a little less stiff for a moment. "I'll give you the cliff notes version," she said abruptly.

"Pretend I've forgotten everything about the past year," I suggested.

"Fine." Sam paused, apparently deciding where to begin. "All right. So, the portal activated, and you died in it." I could tell it was painful for her to say because her voice was clipped and angry. "But the portal was working. Your parents decided to leave it running in your honor or some such crap. I wish they hadn't.

"Not long after that, ghosts started appearing in Amity Park. Your parents went nuts hunting them down, but as fast as they could put them in the Ghost Portal, more came through … we didn't even know that's where they were coming from, for a long time. Your parents insisted it could only let people view the Ghost Zone, not the other way around.

"And then your dad died. Got killed by some ghost calling himself the Ghost Zone's Greatest Hunter."

I stiffened. "Skulker," I said quietly. Of course, Vlad had sent him to kill Dad. My fist clenched around one bloody wipe.

Sam's wound was starting to weep blood slowly again, but that was probably good. I retrieved the peroxide from the kit and tried to detach myself from the story Sam was telling.

"Fe-- … your sister was hysterical, and so was your mom. And then, your mom just disappeared. Poof, gone. We don't know what happened."

"Vlad," I muttered this time, taking a deep breath through clenched teeth.

Sam stiffened at the word, and suddenly, her knee slammed into my chest. The breath was instantly knocked from me. I fell back on my hands, wheezing.

"What was that for?" I gasped as soon as I could.

"There's a reason we don't say names here!" Sam snapped. "You don't know who's listening! Now, please just shut up."

I stared at her. Sam's temper had always been dangerous, but usually she was more underhanded in her revenge. I was quiet for a long moment, angry, and about to shoot back that there was no way that names were that dangerous and what was the big deal about Vlad, anyway?

But I held my tongue as common sense began to kick in. I knew nothing about this world, which was obviously totally different from mine. I was missing a lot of pieces still. "Okay. Okay, sorry." I licked my lips. "Should I …?" I pointed at her leg.

"Yeah. I'm sorry, too," Sam said after a moment. "It's just … don't be so thickheaded, okay?"

I nodded, leaning back over the wound. I poured a little peroxide on some gauze and swiped it over the cut carefully.

Sam sucked in a sharp breath and let it out, probably from the peroxide. Then she continued: "About then we figured out where the ghosts were coming from. Your sister started working on how to close and deactivate the portal along with Tray." She paused. "Uh … you know …"

"My other best friend?" I asked dryly. Tucker would have been the one to deal with that kind of tech, of course. "Is he here too?"

"… We'll deal with that later," Sam said after a beat. "Anyway, they didn't get very far with it, because shortly after that there was a massive ghost invasion. There was open war. The Guys in White showed up and fought, but it just kept getting worse, and worse …" Sam seemed to get lost in her memories about here, and I was just silent. She had to be talking about the invasion of Pariah Dark.

I imagined what would have happened without the Red Hunter and myself there. Without my parents, there would have been no Fenton Ecto-Skeleton to help take Pariah Dark down. Even without the Ring of Rage, he was still way too powerful to be fought without it. And I remembered, distantly, the last thing I had seen before I fainted in Pariah's chambers: Vlad and every other ghost I knew, including the Fright Knight, helping me defeat Pariah.

Sam interrupted my thoughts. "There was a shift in power. Pariah Dark was the ghost that had invaded, but he was defeated by the new Ghost King – and I think he was probably even worse.

"He started kidnapping humans – just had ghosts overshadow them and walk them right into his clutches. And then, he implanted these in their heads." She reached back, shifting her leg, and I had to catch a dribble of peroxide. I was almost ready to dress the wound, but I looked up when she held out in her hand a small microchip, the size of maybe my pinky fingernail. It looked quashed.

"It alters thoughts," Sam explained. "Not this one, any more, but the working ones. This is the chip that was in my head." She put it aside again while I tried to digest all this. "It basically made the whole human population docile, perfect servants, slaves, whatever. It's utter tyranny. And the Ghost King is always producing more and more ghost skeletons and recruiting more and more human slaves. He's taken over most of the US and Canada, or so we think. We don't exactly have TVs here." She smirked ruefully.

I was speechless. You probably would have been, too, if you'd been me. And still there were missing pieces to this puzzle, like how Sam had become the Red Hunter. Hadn't Vlad been Val's benefactor? Where was he in this story, anyway? In my dimension he had caused the Pariah Dark invasion, so … had he been killed, or what?

"How did you get your chip out?" I asked, patting a long strip of gauze over her gash.

"That … I can't tell you. Not yet." Sam gave me a skeptical look as I taped down the gauze. "You're pretty good at this."

She was changing the subject, and I didn't want to drop it. "Why can't you tell me?" I asked stubbornly.

Sam glared at me. "I don't trust you."

I gaped at her. "Why not? You said ghosts can't bleed red!" I protested, holding up the finger she'd sliced open.

Sam's smirk was cold and ironic. "For all I know, you're a clone, or one of the Ghost King's lackeys. You might not even know it." She bared her teeth slightly in a snarl. "No one is trustworthy. You better learn that fast." She stood up the moment I was done taping the gauze. "You're going to stay here until Ferina's had a chance to look at you. We clear?"

I felt hurt and angry. "You let me take care of that but you won't trust me anyway?"

"Those were all my own supplies, and I would have seen you do something stupid like try to poison me. That's not the Ghost King's style, anyway. Now, stay here."

I watched her leave, disconcerted.

&

I wasn't alone for long, though. 'Keira' came around the corner a few minutes later, her arms crossed over her chest.

I didn't quite know what to say, honestly. If Sam didn't trust me, there was no way Val trusted me either. What had Sam said about me? I could be a clone? So somewhere, someone had figured out how to make clones and were making them for the Ghost King, who was even worse than Pariah Dark. Somehow.

The only being I could think of was my evil future self … but he couldn't possibly exist. I was dead here (a thought that gave me the shivers). Wasn't I?

I mulled over this for a while, plucking at my slowly drying jeans. Maybe I wasn't actually dead. Maybe, instead, I was a full ghost. I didn't even know what to think about that one, though – and it certainly didn't mean I was my evil future self.

"Ferina will be here soon," Val said suddenly, glancing over her shoulder and down the piping.

"Oh," was all I could say. I wanted to know if 'Tray' was here, and I'll admit that I was pretty nervous about being seen by Jazz. Sam's reaction had been cold, flat, almost angry, but Jazz might cry, and I didn't think I could handle that. I mean, I had to go back home!

"Uh … uh, Keira," I said slowly. "That's not your real name is it?"

Valerie raised an eyebrow at me. "Why're you asking?"

I made a helpless gesture. "I'm just confused. I didn't mean to end up here, I'm not a spy, and I just really want to go home." My voice almost cracked on the word 'home'. I missed Mom and Dad and their crazy ways already, and I missed my Sam and my Tucker, who were both normal and relatively carefree. I mean, I had thought I had it hard, but at least I wasn't living in the sewers. And where were the adults, anyway? Were they all captured by the Ghost King?

Keira's eyes softened slightly when I said that. "Look, kid, Ferina will check you, you're probably clean, and then we'll all trust you," she said. "That make you feel better?"

"A little," I admitted, still feeling sorry for myself.

"Here she comes," Keira said abruptly, and stepped aside, admitting none other than my sister. She wore overalls and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail with a kerchief tied in it.

Her mouth opened, then closed, and I raised my eyebrows, my eyes widening a little.

"Hi, Ja—uh … Ferina," I said, her fake name sounding flat in my mouth.

"It really is you," Jazz said softly, flying across the 'room' and hugging me.

"Oof!" I said, but actually, it felt really good to be hugged and cared about. It might have been stupid, but I felt really guilty about dying in this universe. If I'd been alive, nothing bad would have happened in the first place. "Okay, um, you can stop now," I said automatically, for the sake of appearances.

Jazz let me go and held my shoulders, looking at me from arm's length. "I just … Kobal told you, right?"

I raised my eyebrows. "Who's Kobal?"

Jazz leaned forward and whispered in my ear. "Sam," she said. "Kobal is Sam."

&

While Jazz hugged me, my ghost half …

"I already told you," I exclaimed, exasperated and exhausted at once, "I didn't do anything to Danny! Technus did something to me, and then he just disappeared with Technus!"

"Then you're on a first-name basis with other ghosts," my mom remarked coolly.

My eyebrow twitched. I was angry, but I was also completely at my parents' mercy and possessing about as much leverage as I did when I came home with an 'F' on a paper. "Uh, that's just what he goes by. What do you want me to do, call him Ghost X?"

"Don't force me to make things more uncomfortable for you," Mom warned, her eyes flashing. Yes, I say 'flashed'. I could have sworn lightning went through them.

"More uncomfortable? How?" I couldn't help mocking. "It can't possibly be worse than the Thermos."

About then my mom pulled out a remote control, which made my Dad beam proudly, and I suddenly had a worst-case-scenario flash-forward in which my parents were electrocuting me again and again until my spectral form just fell apart. "Okay, okay, I believe you! Don't!" I exclaimed, waving my hands in front of myself.

Mom paused, and Dad pouted. If I'd had a heart, it would have been trying to pound its way out of my chest. "Then tell us the truth," Mom snapped.

"It is the truth! Why would I lie about this?" I cried.

An electrical pulse flashed through me from the bars under my feet. "Ow!" I shouted, feeling my form waver slightly from the shock.

"I can do this all day," Mom warned.

"And I can watch her!" Dad enthused.

I felt very ill and disoriented, gritting my teeth against the knowledge my own parents were about to torture a damning lie out of me.

Tbc

Remember Kobal? From the short little teaser? Yeah. Hope that one leaves you in knots for a while. Bwahaha.

I'd like to say thank you to MoonyMonster, who gave me the idea for the previous dimension-travel that was mentioned in canon, and to Bluemoonalto, for her concept of what a ghost's existence is like in the Fenton Thermos.

Also, apologies to YumeTakato, whose name I misspelled. I assure you, this was not because I watch Puffy AmiYumi: I just misread 'Yume' (dream) as 'Yumi' (bow, as in 'bow and arrow'). A thousand apologies.

Finally, thank you again to everyone who reviewed the last chapter: YumeTakato, Sword on Fire (Jazmin3 Firewing), Sasia, Amitra, and Unrealistic. You guys rock. You rock out loud!

Reviews are loved and adored.