Chapter 7: My Brother's Keeper

My sister waited for Mom to go back upstairs before talking again. "This is one heck of a pickle you've gotten yourself into, Danny," she said.

"Thanks for clarifying that for me, Jazz," I snorted, sarcasm lacing my voice. "I wasn't sure."

Jazz ignored my tone. "Are you okay?"

Inexplicable anger rose in my throat. Why does everyone keep asking me that? NO, I'M NOT OKAY! But I let out my breath in a hiss instead. "I'll be okay. I'm just … really tired."

I knew it was true even as I said it. I felt like I could go upstairs and sleep for a hundred years.

"We were just about to free him," Sam explained.

"No, I was about to free him, and Sam was going to scream like a banshee that Phantom's escaped," Tucker corrected her.

Jazz pondered this for several moments longer than I wanted her to. "Um, can I please get out of here?"

Tucker was already hooking his PDA up again. "On it, Danny," he reported, happily absorbed in his technology.

"Wait a moment," Jazz said.

"What?" Sam and I spoke at once. Tucker rolled his eyes.

"Not again …"

Jazz looked surprised by the protest; then she raised her hands in front of her, waving them apologetically. "Oh, no, I just think we ought to think this through. If Danny is in another dimension, and the rest of Danny is here …" she fell silent, absorbed in thought.

I pounded a fist against the Ghost Shield, and it produced an equal wave of power in response, thrusting my fist back forcefully. "Argh! Jazz, think faster!"

"Okay, okay!" Jazz glared at me. "I was just doing research on psychic connections, you see? You probably have a connection with your human half. I don't know much about parallel dimensions, but there's supposedly an infinite number of them. How're we supposed to find Danny in an infinite number of dimensions without some way of locating him?"

"… You're suggesting using me as homing device," I said.

"That's not a half-bad idea," Sam offered, but I rolled my eyes.

"Oh, I'll bet Mom and Dad will really go for that. Sure, let's team up with a ghost to find Danny! Hah!"

"Hey, your dad teamed up with you against Vlad," Tucker reminded me.

He had a point. I huffed irritably. "What does this have to do with getting me out of this thing?"

"You just said it a minute ago," Sam answered me. "You'd have to go into hiding, so how're you supposed to help your parents out from a warehouse on the edge of town or something?"

Now she had a point. I scowled at nothing in particular.

Jazz was looking at me in that 'I'm about to psychoanalyze you' way that I really hated. "What?"

"Are you really okay, Danny?" Jazz asked, only with a more pointed look this time.

"Is it wrong for me to want out of this dog cage?" I shot back. Okay, I was a little freaked about the possibility of being left alone with Mom and Dad again while I was in here, but I didn't really want to say that aloud.

Something seemed to click with Jazz, but she didn't say anything about it. "No, of course not," she comforted me. "I have an idea. I'll go talk to Mom and Dad about how you're willing to cooperate and help find Danny. If it backfires, I'll come down and we'll free you right away, okay? But if they agree, we'll make the terms and conditions: you have to be let free again."

I gave Jazz a helpless look. "They think I overshadowed my human half."

"So you were trying to protect him! Dad may want to take you apart molecule by molecule, but I think they were halfway to believing you were at least benign."

I looked at Sam and Tucker, hoping for some guidance, but they both shrugged at me. "It's worth a shot," Sam said.

"And I'm all set to let you out if you need it," Tucker reported.

I sighed with resignation. "All right," I agreed.

Jazz gave me a reassuring smile, approaching the cage and putting a hand right through the Ghost Shield to rest on my shoulder. It startled me until I remembered that it was only a ghost shield, not a human shield. "I promise I won't let Mom and Dad be alone with you until you're free, okay?"

I couldn't help the wave of affection I felt for my sister just then. I pressed my hand over hers. "Thanks."

Jazz withdrew her hand. "Okay, you just sit tight! This shouldn't take long." She ran back up the stairs.

I looked at Sam and Tucker. "Wanna bet five dollars you're busting me out of here in five minutes?" I asked.

Tucker grinned. "Dude, if anyone can convince your parents you're not evil, it's Jazz."

&

We had a long, tense ten minutes while Jazz talked to Mom and Dad. I started making ectoplasm balls again just to keep myself occupied: one, two, five … I was up to seven when Sam finally broke the silence. "Is that a new trick, Danny?"

I didn't look up at her. "I guess so. I've never been able to make ectoplasm that's stable apart from me."

"Dude!" Tucker exclaimed. "That's solid object ectoplasmic manipulation! The only other ghost that we've seen do that is—"

"Vlad!" Sam finished for him. "Danny, you're gaining on him!"

I grinned wanly. "I doubt it. But it's still a step up, right?"

There was noise at the top of the stairs before we could say anything more, and I hurriedly gathered the ectoplasm, crushing it between my fingers and inadvertently reabsorbing it. Tucker hid his connected PDA behind his back hurriedly.

Mom and Dad were coming down the stairs, and Jazz was with them. I shot her a worried look; she smiled and nodded slightly.

They had agreed? I could hardly believe it! Still, I relaxed marginally.

"Jazz tells us you're willing to make up for your behavior by helping us find Danny," Mom said.

So that was how Jazz had cast it? Well, I wasn't going to complain: it had worked! "Yeah," I nodded. "I want to make things even with you again."

Mom scrutinized me, and I tried to look innocent, although I doubted I succeeded much. No ghost looked innocent to Mom and Dad. "It's very dangerous," she warned.

"I'm a ghost," I pointed out wryly. All the same, I couldn't help but think it couldn't possibly be more dangerous than being electrocuted until I was an ectoplasmic smear.

"You could be trapped in a parallel dimension if we fail."

"You? Fail?" I scoffed, trying not to think of the hundreds of junked inventions my parents had made. "You caught me, you can't be that bad at anything."

Dad beamed proudly at that, then seemed to remember he was supposed to look stern. Sam was rolling her eyes behind their back.

Mom crossed her arms. "All right. Put out your wrists."

I blinked at her. "I can't put them out very far," I joked, presenting my wrists by pressing my upturned fists against the ghost shield.

That was obviously good enough for Mom. She reached through the bars, and I watched as my own mom snapped a pair of slightly glowing handcuffs onto my wrists. I recognized them dimly; they were very similar to the ones Skulker had strapped onto Val and me when he decided to hunt us in tandem. "Let me guess," I said when Mom opened her mouth. "These cancel out my ghost powers."

Mom closed her mouth again, looking a little surprised. "Yes," she answered after a moment. She stepped back. "I'm going to deactivate the shield now. If you try anything funny--!"

"I'm not going to do anything!" I snapped, exasperated by this point. "Don't you get it? I'm not evil, I'm not trying to destroy you, I didn't do anything to Danny, and I want to help!"

The outburst startled everyone in the room, I think. For a long moment, I was the object of everyone's pointed attention.

I didn't back down. "Go ahead. See if I try anything."

Mom watched me intently for one more moment, then turned towards the controls to the cage – or so I guessed. Apparently my outburst had accidentally given Tucker enough time to disconnect his PDA and shove it back in his pocket. Mom typed something into the computer, and the green glow around the cage faded.

Finally! I almost slammed my foot into the cage door to free myself, but stopped at the last second. That might be too aggressive for Mom and Dad.

Jazz was the one that courteously opened the cage door for me. I scooted out and stood, stretching my cuffed wrists above my head in exaltation of relative freedom, unable to help a smile spreading on my face. Jazz' face was carefully straight, but Sam was beaming.

"Okay," I said when I realized no one else was going to speak. "Where do we start?"

&

Mom led us back upstairs, a long line of troops going to battle. We went to the kitchen, where papers were spread all over the table. "It's just a blueprint for now, but we won't rest until it's built," Mom said, deathly serious.

"What is it?" Tucker asked, spreading his fingers over one of the sheets.

"It's an interdimensional portal!" Dad explained in his over-enthusiastic way. "It lets us view and enter other dimensions!"

The last time I had heard the word 'Portal' in connection with a Fenton Invention, I had become half-ghost. What are they going to do, build it right next to the Ghost Portal? I wondered wryly. I could see it now: Danny Phantom, Protector of Worlds. The thought made me hide a smirk. What would happen if I got caught in this portal? Would I be split infinitely across the universe? Ew!

I was so wrapped up in my own musings that I almost missed what Dad said next – although to be perfectly honest, that would have been impossible. Just between you and me, when Dad gets excited, his voice can be heard in China. I swear it's the truth.

Anyway, Dad continued. "It will only let us into the dimensions closest to our own!"

"Wait, hold up," Tucker protested, putting up a hand. I was willing to bet this was all very interesting to him. For me, it was verging on a foreign language. "What dimensions are closest to our own?"

"The theory goes that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, reflecting every possibility," Mom interjected. "But it's nearly impossible to go to a world that's extremely different from your own."

"And a good thing, too, or we'd still be stuck in that other parallel dimension!" Dad reminded us.

Jazz raised her eyebrows. "Wait, I remember that …"

"So all those shows about meeting your evil twin are basically impossible," Sam mused.

"Yes, dear, that's exactly it!" Mom beamed. Then she became serious again in a heartbeat, the way only my parents could. "If Danny were to survive the trip, there's only so many universes he could have been sent to – no more than a hundred or so. Possibly less, although I'll have to do more calculations to be sure," she explained.

Sam had gone a little pale at the way my mom said 'if Danny were to survive'.

"He's alive," I said aloud, mostly to reassure Sam, but the statement got me three pointed looks – my sister's look of warning, and my parents' looks of surprise.

Sam, at least, looked a little less upset.

I hastened to cover myself. "L-look, I overshadowed him, and I just have this feeling, okay?"

Mom didn't look impressed. I grew sheepish. "You were saying?" I prompted.

My mom's eyes narrowed slightly, but looked back down at the blueprints. "We're not sure how the portal will appear in other dimensions, and we have to hurry, of course – Danny could be in danger," she explained.

"And now that Phantom is helping us, we can move faster since a human doesn't have to be able to fit the portal!" Dad added. "It'll be like old times, right, Maddie? We'll make it just about the same size." Mom smiled indulgently at him.

'The same size'? "The same size?" Jazz, Tucker, and Sam all echoed in near unison my own thoughts.

"As our first ghost portal!" Dad said. "It was about yea big …" He showed us the space the first Ghost Portal had taken up with his hands, spreading them about a foot and a half from each other.

I didn't need the measurements; I had seen the portal in person not long ago, when I tried to stop Vlad from getting ecto-acne. I also knew there was only one person fitting through a hole that size.

"I can't fit through that with these on," I protested, holding out my wrists. Indeed, the cuffs prevented me from shifting my form or even flying and levitating; I was about as close to human as a ghost could get. So to speak.

"We'll think of something," Mom said absently, looking back through the blueprints. "The biggest challenge is figuring out how to get you back from each dimension. We don't know how permanent the portal will be on the other side."

"How long will it take you to make this?" Tucker asked, still shuffling through the blueprints.

"Not long! We Fentons can work 24-7 when we have to!" Dad reminded Tucker. A fact I knew all too well, and was ultimately grateful for. The last time they'd faced a huge crisis they could do something about had been when Pariah Dark invaded, and it had taken them two days to finish the (slightly faulty) Fenton Suit.

I was willing to accept the risks. "What're you going to do with me in the meantime?" I asked, almost dreading the answer.

Mom smiled. "You're going to wait here." She pointed out the window.

The green glow of the Fenton Ghost Shield washed over our backyard, and I sighed aloud. So much for being trusted.

Tbc

And now back to the pressing question you all want answered.

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