Flying is easily my favorite ghost power. It never failed to cheer me up, calm my thoughts, make everything make sense. That night, I really needed that.

When I came back to Tucker's house, he was sleeping, and I was a lot more rational. I was also a lot more determined to learn the truth.

There were two and one-half ghosts that I knew for sure weren't my father: Boxy, Clockwork, and Plasmius. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

I grabbed a notebook out of my backpack and began listing every single male ghost I'd ever met, minus those two and one-half. Skulker, Technus, Bertrand, Poindexter, Vortex, Undergrowth, Amorpho, Nocturne, the Dairy King, Fright Knight, Klemper, Ghost Writer, Walker, Prince Aragon, assorted Observants, assorted yetis, assorted salamanders, random knights from Dora's kingdom, random warriors from Pandora's kingdom…. The list went on and on.

Time for the process of elimination. I tapped my pencil against the paper, thinking. Skulker… that would certainly lend an interesting flavor to our weekly meetings. Maybe if we were related, he'd quit hunting me? I considered it for a moment, then shook my head. Not worth it.

But back on topic, he didn't look anything like me. Beneath his suit, he was a nine-inch-high blob.

Wait. Unlike Skulker, I was half-human. Maybe my human blood kept me from looking like my ghost father? So if my father was really inhuman-looking, I wouldn't resemble him because I was a halfa?

Then how the heck was I supposed to figure this out!

Okay, Fenton-Phantom, think. You obviously didn't inherit your ghost powers from Natalia. Therefore, you must have gotten at least some from your dad. I made a new list, a list of my powers. Ghost sense, flight, invisibility, intangibility, duplication, overshadowing, ecto-blasts, ice, fire, lightning, wind, the Ghostly Wail, teleportation, telekinesis, shape-shifting, gift of tongues, creating portals….

Five of those were common to pretty much everyone in the Ghost Zone, so I ignored them. No one else, save Dan and Danni, had the Ghostly Wail. My ghost sense was just another facet of my ice powers. Telekinesis, teleportation, and duplication were actually fairly common, though other ghosts' telekinesis was limited to a specific kind of object (tech for Technus, boxes for Boxy, etc.). So my unique-but-not-unheard-of powers were ice, fire, lightning, wind, shape-shifting, gift of tongues, and creating portals.

Obviously, the yetis had ice powers, but none of them had fire powers. In the same way, salamanders had fire powers but now ice powers. That probably meant I wasn't related to any of them. The only other ice elemental I could think of was Klemper. It would be just like him to give some random government agent an ectoplasm sample to initiate a friendship.

I shuddered.

Lightning and wind were some of Vortex's gifts. I frowned, remembering how we'd first met. I'd had power over all kinds of weather then. I put a little star by Vortex's name, grimaced, sighed, and added another star to Klemper's.

Two ghosts on my list had shape-shifting powers- Bertrand and Amorpho. Two more stars went on the list.

Creating portals was a dead end. None of these ghosts had that power. Wulf did, but Danni knew him.

The good news? We probably weren't related to Technus, Walker, or an Observant. The bad news? We might be the unholy spawn of Klemper or Vortex.

Joy.

The Guys in White had built their Amity Park base two years ago, right around Pariah Dark's invasion. Since then, we'd busted into their lair five times. Despite what Danni (who had never done it) thought, it really wasn't very difficult. In fact, it was rather like breaking into FentonWorks.

A random goon was wandering through the halls. I overshadowed him, then directed his bulky body to the entry hall, where Tucker was talking at the secretary. "You! Kid! What're you doing?" I bellowed.

Our eyes met. Mine flashed green. Tuck grinned. "The aliens are coming!" he proclaimed theatrically. "They're coming! And then they're going to steal our meat. We have to stop them."

Sometimes, I really worry about him.

"We're ghost hunters, kid! We don't worry about aliens."

"But they're GHOST aliens!"

"Well why didn't you say so? Come with me, kid."

"Ghost aliens," muttered the disgusted secretary. I snickered. Wonder how she'd react to the Observants?

It was pathetically easy, really, once I'd gotten Tucker past security. He simply plopped down, plugged in his infamous PDA, and started typing. I waited. The PDA beeped. "Done."

We walked back to the lobby, where I picked him up by the scruff of the neck, threw him out, and roared, "Next time, bring proof!"

"But the aliens-"

"Proof!" I floated out of the agent's body.

Fortunately, the government's database was rather more organized than my foster-parents'. All Tucker had to do was type in "Ghost Zone," set the date parameters to before August 1991, and click Go.

There was a bunch of theoretical stuff, which we largely ignored. We dredged through the files for almost an hour before finding a stupidly encrypted file entitled "Expedition 1989."

"Think that's it?" wondered Sam.

"Yes I do." By now I was getting jittery. Tucker could hack that file in just a few minutes. I was just a few minutes away from learning my true father's name. Please don't be Klemper….

"And we're in!" Tucker gloated. "Take that, you overpaid government tech-slaves! I win!"

Sam and I rolled our eyes. "How about we let Danny read this first?" Sam suggested. Tucker blinked at her, so she elaborated. "It is his father. I kind of think he should be alone." She paused. "It's too bad the other Danni couldn't make it. She should see this."

"Fine," the techno-geek sulked.

My hands trembled as I approached the computer. Please oh please don't be Klemper; I'd even accept an Observant or Vortex or someone else I don't like, but please not Klemper. Please oh please oh please….

The aberration is still present. We've quarantined the area, but Operative Q caught some cameramen trying to get past the police lines. They're in custody now.

The Head has come to inspect it personally. Like the rest of us, he believes that it is a natural portal into the Ghost Zone. However, unlike the rest of us, he knows how to proceed. He immediately summoned the disgraced Corporal C-29. He said that there is only one way that she could become a full agent: she had to go inside the Ghost Zone to explore it. C-29 asked for time to prepare and vowed to return tomorrow with supplies.

It started ranting about what Corporal C-29 had done to make the GiW Head so angry at her. I ignored it, scrolling down until they finally got to the point. It took a while.

C-29 came equipped with a radiation suit, a large syringe for taking samples, several weapons (no one knows where she acquired them; the Head threatened to charge her with theft if she wasn't successful), a camera, and a long, thick rope. She tied one end of the rope around her waist and handed the other end to a nearby operative. Then she entered the portal.

The Corporal did not return for several hours. When she finally did come back into the human world, this is what she told us. There was a button beneath. I clicked it, and a woman's voice began speaking. Sam and Tucker edged over to the corner, pretending they weren't hanging on her every word.

"The first thing I noticed was that it was a lot darker than the human realm. I started wondering if ghosts had time zones, then my eyes adjusted and I realized I was inside this huge hallway. It didn't have any windows, and it was a lot more dimly lit than anyplace back home, so I thought that either ghosts have really good night vision- I couldn't see very well, even when my eyes were fully adjusted- or nobody was home.

"Since I had no idea what else to do, I went straight. Really wished I'd brought a flashlight, but it was probably good that I didn't because if I had, I'd've turned it on and the ghosts might have found me. It was a pretty barren place: nothing on the walls, or floor, just bare stone. Still, I wasn't surprised. It's not like ghosts are advanced enough to appreciate art.

"There were some doors, but only on the right side of the hall- I mean the right side as I was going in, not the right side as I was coming back. They were all locked, though, and I didn't want to, like, try and ram them down. I went over to the other side, and it turns out there were arrow slits in the wall." She paused. "Actually, they were probably ecto-blast slits.

"The walls curved a bit, so little that I didn't notice for a while. Then I realized that I was in a circular building. The outer walls led outside, but the inner walls led to other parts of the weirdo building. It was pretty big, too, but nothing was there. At least, nothing that I could see. They might've been watching me invisibly.

"Eventually I noticed that one of the doors was ajar. By then I'd been wandering for maybe half an hour, forty minutes or something. I was really starting to get sick of this, so I went inside. The door led to a really big room. It was even darker than the hall, but I could see that something was glowing a few feet away. I went over, and you'll never believe what it was." She paused again.

"Get on with it, Corporal," growled a male voice.

"Yes, sir," she mumbled, chagrined. "It was a giant vat of- of something that I think might be ectoplasm, or at least have ectoplasm in it! Whatever it was, it was green-tinted and glowing. They'd put it on some kind of lightless heat source, I think, because it was hotter near the vat than everywhere else and the ectoplasm was simmering, just slowly bubbling.

"I had absolutely no idea why it was there or why they'd made some kind of ectoplasm soup, but I wasn't going to question my luck. So I dunked my syringe into the vat and high-tailed it."

The unnamed man (maybe he was the Head?) started quizzing her for more details. How high were the walls? How far had she walked before coming to the open door? Why hadn't she taken any pictures- she HAD a camera, didn't she? How big was the room? How many arrow slits were there? Had she heard anything? Smelled? Tasted? Touched?

The corporal answered as best she could, but it was obvious her superior wasn't satisfied. When the computer grew silent, C-29 was almost in tears.

"That's it?" I howled. "That can't be it!" Furious, I clicked on the recording again.

"The first thing I noticed was that it was a lot darker than the human realm. I started won-"

"No! Fast forward or something. Tell me who he is!" I wanted nothing more than to blast the infernal machine into a million tiny pieces.

"Chill, man!" yelled Tucker. "Hurting my baby won't do anything!"

"Your baby?"

"Yes. My baby."

I slumped. "Sorry, Tuck. It's just… I got my hopes up, and now this big amazing lead is a bust. Why would anyone boil their ectoplasm in a giant vat in some ginormous abandoned building? No, wait, I know the answer. He was probably building something really powerful."

When a ghost wants to create an item of power (i.e., one of Clockwork's Time Medallions), he or she will often mix base materials with his or her own blood to imbibe it with the correct metaphysical properties. With the Time Medallions, Clockwork coated the metal with a mix of ichor and water from the Rivers Styx and Lethe. We knew something new about my father- he was a crafter- but we had no way of finding his name. In other words, we were back to square one.

Even worse, natural portals could open anywhere and anywhen. For all I knew, this hadn't even happened yet.

Sam chewed her lip. "Well, Clockwork mentioned that other-Danni's bust-into-the-base idea was a good one, so we're probably on the right track."

"But what are we supposed to do? I was expecting a description, maybe a name or something. How am I supposed to track down the guy who was crafting whatever it was he was crafting? I can't just go up to Vortex and say, 'Hey, excuse me, but have you ever built something of your own ectoplasm?' Not to mention I'd need an excuse for asking him, and I really don't want anyone outside the family to know about this, at least not until I know for sure."

Tucker scrolled through the file. "Nothing," he sighed. "Oh, wait- scratch that! It turns out that the ectoplasm only consisted of three percent of the total sample." His face scrunched up. "That means he's powerful, right?"

"Yeah. Any ghost who can create something in a three percent mixture is pretty tough." In other words, it could not possibly be Klemper. At least something good came out of this.

The only thing we could do was get out my list. We were left with Vortex, Undergrowth, Nocturne, Fright Knight, Prince Aragon, an Observant, and a couple of Dora's tougher knights. Vortex's name was the only one with a star.

"So… should I hunt down Vortex and ask?" I hoped not. We didn't like each other, but he was the only one who shared at least some of my powers. That made him the most likely candidate.

"Isn't he in prison?"

"Good point." Just what I always wanted- a crazy locked-up father. "Funnily enough, I'm not too enthusiastic about any of these choices."

Sam patted my back. "Maybe you've forgotten someone?"

"Maybe." I didn't believe her, and she knew it. "I'll show Danni the list, see if she's met anyone."

Sam kissed my cheek. "Don't worry, Danny. We'll find him."

"Yeah."

I still didn't believe her.

Not all ghost objects are made of blood (that would be creepy). However, the most powerful ones, the ones keyed to a specific person, were exposed to ghost blood during their construction.

Styx and Lethe: two rivers in the Greek Underworld. Styx was the river of hate which formed the borders, and Lethe was the river of forgetfulness. The other three rivers were Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Acheron.

Salamander: fire elementals from the Burning Lands. They look like large, scaled humans with fire-colored scales (blue, gold, orange, and/or red), spiky tails, and fire for hair. They are ruled by Pyrrha, Frostbite's fiancée.

Thrall (mentioned in chapter 3): skeleton-ghosts of the type in Pariah's army. Thralls are literally mindless and soulless, and most ghosts try to avoid them.

The long-awaited name shall be revealed next chapter. Until then, keep guessing.