Danny was finding it hard to work up the will to engage in anything that his stolen senses told him was occurring around him. It was if something had torn loose, somewhere, and somehow the information from them had become a flood he couldn't escape; something he tried to withdraw from to preserve what was left of his sanity. The cold, pervasive fog of numbness he'd been operating in for the past eight hours could only be briefly lifted by a flash of emotion strong enough to temporarily abate it, and it was like heat against cold; painful after the fact from the difference alone.

He'd struggled against it, but now, spent, he drifted in it like something ephemeral… and Lancer's vocab quizzes were really paying off if he had remembered that word enough to think it in its correct context. He could metaphorically blink and an hour would have passed during which he practically didn't exist; it was almost like sleeping.

He could tell it worried Phantom. He found it difficult to really care about that, either. Something did nag at him, though, long after the fact, and it took a second to click.

Who was that ghost you chased? It looked like you knew him.

"You mean Skulker?" Phantom said, sounding surprised, and Danny could see Sam glance at him out of the corner of his eye. "He's a hunter… sometimes bounty hunter. I haven't seen him in over a decade."

"I was just starting out," Phantom continued when Danny couldn't think of anything to say to that, rubbing the back of his neck, something Danny couldn't help noticing. "We only met once, but it was the first time I'd ever sort of both lost and won. I won the actual fight but didn't stop him in time to prevent him taking Delilah into the Ghost Zone." Danny got the sense it had heavily bothered him at the time.

"What!?" Sam said to his left, and she came into view as his head snapped towards her. "Is that the reason why purple backed gorillas are now listed as extinct!?"

Uh oh, Danny said, but without much feeling since he hadn't even noticed except in the vaguest sense when Sam had kicked his shin earlier. His worry about his new outlook on injury had faded with everything else, and it now felt like he was just a passenger in someone else's car. Why care if they metaphorically dinged a bumper? It was only something to get concerned about if an actual crash happened.

Phantom held up his hands. "Hey, blame Skulker, not me!"

"I am, believe me," said Sam, and he noticed her hands were clenched into fists. "Is it possible Delilah is still alive, somewhere in there?"

Phantom appeared to deliberate, weighing up his options before eventually shaking his head. "…no," he said finally, keeping a safe distance out of immediate kicking range. "Even if living creatures could survive in the Ghost Zone, I doubt Skulker would know how to keep her. She's probably a rug or something by now."

"You didn't go after her?" Sam enquired, a bit of a dangerous edge to it. Danny suddenly wished he could metaphorically eat popcorn, watching this. Phantom bristled, as if the question had been an insult to his professional pride.

"Hey! He closed the portal he used after him, and this was in the days before I had any means of getting there! By the time I did, it was probably too late, anyway. And there was other stuff I needed to deal with." 'I'm not exactly a good portal maker', Danny recalled him saying with a sheepish expression. Sounded like he'd tried, at least. Sam, unaware of this previous conversation, looked less convinced, arms folded underneath an unsatisfied scowl.

What do you mean by living creatures can't survive there? When you said it was dangerous, I thought you meant the ghosts!

Phantom looked mildly relieved to have a minor change of topic dropped in his lap. "Well, there's apparently enough oxygen in the ectoplasm everywhere that you could breathe it, but there's no water or food. I mean, there's ghost versions of those things but…"

"…they wouldn't do anything good." Sam finished, seeming to understand, or at least looking less spikily borderline hostile.

"Exactly," Phantom replied.

Danny found himself thinking about mice swimming in tanks of clear thick liquid, a detour he'd gone down once looking for stuff on space travel. Their lungs had eventually ruptured from the strain, and he was glad he couldn't feel ill thinking about that in terms of himself, in the Ghost Zone, both drowning and breathing in ambient ectoplasm. Or that any expression to that effect didn't show on his face for the same reason.

No wonder his parents had never gone in the Ghost Zone in favour of sending in the occasional probe instead. It was something that had always slightly puzzled him. He'd always put it down to the fact that they didn't need to go looking for ghosts when the ghosts came to them.

Sam seemed just as uneasy, and Danny could tell she was probably thinking about Delilah's similar fate. He wondered if anything that died in the Ghost Zone was guaranteed to form a ghost, but didn't really want to ask. Just like he didn't want to know how Phantom knew the ambient ectoplasm of the GZ was breathable when he had no need to.

Well, no need to until now.

Phantom seemed to suddenly become aware of the discomfort and very conspicuously changed the subject, folding his arms behind his head as they walked towards Tucker's place. "I wonder why he's here now," he mused. "As far as I know, Amity Park Zoo is still banned from holding critically endangered species." Which was why it was now a barely breaking even joke of what it had once been. Danny had never seen it in its heyday, but he was friends with Sam, and Sam had often complained about how Amity Park had once been a leading member of captive breeding programs but was now keeping the animals it had remaining in increasingly poorer conditions due to budget cuts. Or something like that. He may have been distracted by something else at the time.

"What does he hunt when he's not after rare animals?" Sam asked, distaste dripping on the word 'hunt'. Phantom shrugged. "Plasmics, I guess. Probably ones which give him a challenge or look interesting."

Plasmics?

"Ah, ghost animals?" Phantom said. "Except not quite. Basically anything that's a ghost that doesn't have sapience, but they tend not to be any colour other than green. Unless they actually are animals that died." He added after a moment's thought.

Danny recognized the description, enough to know it concerned a nebulous definition with a lot of exceptions to the rule. My parents call those Class I Specters.

Phantom made a face. "Of course they would," is all he said, looking at the sky as if hoping to spot the long gone hunter ghost. "Hmm."

He's not there, Danny pointed out anyway.

"I know," Phantom said. "Hey, Tucker's place!"

Sam wasted no time in throwing a rock at the window belonging to Tucker's bedroom, with the deliberate care of someone who Danny knew had actually broken it doing this once, scaring the crap out of Tucker in the process. It was one of those moments he wished he'd been there to see, but he'd been dragged out to a ghost sighting on the other side of town by his parents, back in the days before the portal where ghosts were something that occupied rumors rather than news reports, and he hadn't been able to escape until later. It had been one of several ill fated attempts to train out that fear response.

A few seconds later, Sam's phone buzzed, and Danny watched as Phantom leaned over to look at the small screen and she tilted it so he could see.

rlly bad timng Sam parents r here

His vision tilted as Sam pulled him behind a bush just before the curtains of the window parted and a feminine face peered out before retreating, the curtains falling back.

"Say… it… was… a… bird," Sam texted back, speaking out loud as she did for his benefit, he guessed. About a minute passed before Tucker's reply, during which a slight breeze picked up and began to move the dead air. His body relaxed, and it took Danny far longer than it should have to place why.

alrdy did. Thy bought it. B there in like 10 min.

"Ten minutes?" Phantom groaned upon reading the words. "Do we have to wait here that long?"

"I'm sure you won't die," Sam said dryly, idly texting a reply that was probably a response in the affirmative. "Again." She leaned in the shade of one of the trees that lined the street, parasol folded and sticking straight up, without any aid, from its position stabbed into the dirt. Phantom, who had remained by the bush, flopped over it and found it wasn't the most solid thing and therefore not a very good weight bearer. Danny heard several twigs snap and the sound of Sam trying not to laugh and managing to very convincingly disguise it as a snort.

Unperturbed, Phantom slowly allowed his body to slide towards the ground, one arm dramatically shaded over his head. "Oh. Oh no. It's happening," he cried completely deadpanly. "I'm melting! Meltiiiing!"

This time Sam really did laugh, and although she quickly managed to cough it back, it didn't erase Phantom's cheeky grin.

I'm mentally rolling my eyes here, Danny told him, the unspoken words nevertheless having a chuckle like tone to them. A warm, content feeling like a summer evening that even an hour ago he would have said was completely out of place given his current state was currently burning off the thick numb haze, restoring some clarity of thought. Besides, it's not that hot, he said, even though he had no way of really knowing; the only temperature he could sense was the coldness that accompanied any one of Phantom's powers being used, spiking from the overshadowing's constant chill. It felt like standing in front of an open freezer.

"Like you'd know," Phantom retorted, calling his bluff. There was a comfortable silence for the next few minutes, broken by the brief rush of cars and the hazy drone of aeroplanes. It probably wasn't as hot as earlier, though, Danny thought, given that Phantom seemed more animated and less… glazed.

Eventually, the front door of Tucker's house opened and a familiar traffic light coloured form stepped out, looking one way, and then the other, catching them, and walking over. Phantom stood up from where he'd been sitting on the pavement crosslegged.

"Hey guys," Tucker said, casually waving in greeting with the hand that wasn't attached to his PDA. Danny had once teasingly asked if he was glued to it, or rather, the equivalent he'd had then, before they'd met Sam, and Tucker had told him no. And then had started talking about cyborgs and the technological singularity and to cut a long story short that conversation had preceded the week they learned about the thankfully nonpermanent nature of superglue and how difficult it is to do everything one handed. "Sup? Where are we going?"

Tucker's expression was one of carefully crafted ease, but Danny had known him long enough to know that he knew something was off here already, even if he hadn't placed it yet. Part of it was probably the fact that throwing a rock at his window was really only reserved for urgency nowadays.

"Tucker, we've got a problem," Sam started without preamble, and Danny watched Tucker's face shift slightly, that miniscule nod of a hunch confirmed. "I was thinking the park," she continued more lightly. It would be mostly empty; at least the 'secret' area they frequented would be. Judging by all the graffiti on the trunk of the tree that enclosed a hidden space that they hadn't put there, they wouldn't be the first nor the last to find or use it.

"More walking?" Phantom groaned, even as he fell into step with the other two. "I don't think I've ever walked this much in one go in my afterlife. How do you stand it?" And that was the final puzzle piece for Tucker; Danny could almost see it fall into place as he put up his hands in the universal 'stop' motion.

"Whoa whoa whoa, wait. Wait. Phantom's still in there!?"

"We can't all fly, Phantom," Sam said, handily combining two replies in one. "Hence problem," she said to Tucker, in the tone of voice of someone who really would have liked to have started talking about it at their destination rather than on the way there, and also would have liked Tucker to have kept his voice down.

"I thought you said two days, man," Tucker said, sounding betrayed, and Phantom's exasperated sigh at having been the target of a similar statement and attendant required explanation twice already probably wasn't the best response, because Tucker's look deepened to having an edge of distrust. He was probably rethinking any good will he'd built up literally overnight, Danny thought.

Amazingly, Phantom caught the expression and immediately backpedaled, holding up his hands in mollification. "I thought it would be two days too," he said, running a hand through his hair. "Turns out I was wrong." That seemed to ease Tucker some, although Danny got the feeling some suspicion remained and was just being artfully hidden.

"So what's the plan?" Tucker said, clapping his hands together and glancing between Sam and Phantom, and by extension Danny, as they walked. "You three do have a plan, right?" he continued after an awkward pause during which Sam and Phantom exchanged glances, the pressed together hands drooping slightly.

If we had a plan, it wouldn't be a problem, Tucker, Danny eventually said.