Danny takes a deep breath as he leaves his house to head to school, happy to get back into the swing of things. He hops off of the porch and waves to his parents who are unloading luggage from the trunk. (Nobody was awake enough to do it the night before)
"See ya guys. I'll probably hang out at Tuck's tonight, is that cool?"
His dad waves back from the GAV, throwing him a thumbs up at the end. "No problem Danno, you know your curfew."
His mom also emerges from the RV, carrying the telescope that seems… a little too large for her. She grunts as she shifts the weight properly.
"Make sure to get the homework you missed from your teachers sweetie, and get it in tomorrow if you can."
Danny cringes, remembering how much of a pain that's going to be. "Ugh, I will. Later!" He waves over his shoulder as he jogs down the sidewalk to meet Sam and Tucker on the next block. He can already hear them chatting around the corner from here, and gains a bit of a skip in his step in anticipation of seeing his friends.
"Dude this sucks though, it's so itchy. How are you even dealing?"
"Doesn't feel that bad to me, are you allergic? When my mom gets bitten the bites swell up to like the size of quarters and get all lumpy. She piles on repellent like it's hairspray to keep them off of her."
Danny stops beside them, interrupting their conversation. "Hey guys, what's up?"
"Hey man, nothing much. How was your vacation?" They begin to walk towards the school at a slow pace, content to get there right on time..
"Pretty good, actually. The waterpark was better than I expected, and the stars were awesome. I'll have to fly you guys up there some weekend to see. We can go out over the lake so it's pitch black too.
"Hey, hey," Tucker spins around to walk backwards in front of Danny. "You were outside a bunch, did you get all eaten up from the mosquitos?"
"Mosquitos?" Danny asks, glancing at Sam.
She shakes her head and pulls him back in place beside her. "My god Tucker, chill with the mosquito bites. I've been hearing you complain about it for the past two days."
"But it sucks! I have one on the back of my neck that won't stop itching, and I'm pretty sure I have one on my leg too now."
"Tuck, it's like the middle of October." Danny points out. "All of the bugs should be dead, right?" He looks towards Sam for confirmation, who nods.
Tucker snorts in disapproval. "Probably don't like you cause you smell like ectoplasm." He mumbles.
"Probably, but it's also not bug season." Danny shrugs. "Maybe you've got spiders in your bed."
"Oh no, no no no- don't be saying that dude."
"You know, I bet he's right-" Sam smirks. "Since it's getting cold out now they're all seeking shelter in warm homes and beds."
"Nuh uh, your theory's flawed, why would you be bitten too then? We didn't hang out in my room, we hung out in yours to read all the ghost books- Oh, oh, show him that one that we found!"
"Oh shoot, yeah." Sam stops to pull out a large book from her backpack, handing it to Danny "I completely forgot about this, but remember when Skulker came and messed you up? I brought it to the Nasty Burger but left it at Tucker's place that night. Do you think this could be useful?"
"I remember this now." Danny flips the pages of the book and checks out the cover, struggling to read the ghostspeak written there. "Yeah." He says, "I can read it, but it's tough. If I remember correctly, it was mostly about how ghosts are naturally made, creation myths, stuff like that, but they're really just myths."
"Well, based on what we've there might be a shred of truth to them. Pandora exists, after all."
"Yeah, and so do some of the Greek and Egyptian gods." He hands the book back to Sam. "Don't you have study sometime before Bio?"
She flips her backpack onto her chest to tuck away the book. "Yeah, why?"
"Well, if you're not busy it would be nice if you could scan some pages and send them to me so I can read it during class on my phone and make it accessible to me whenever. I could read during patrols that way too."
"Sure, I finished all my homework this weekend, so I can do that. You should probably be paying attention in class though."
He waves off her comment and they climb the steps of the high school. "Relax, it'll be fine. As long I do the homework my grades will stay up, we still good for studying after school?"
"We can," Tucker says, "But not at my place, my parents are having a dinner party for some work thing. One of yours would be best."
Danny spins the combo for his locker. "If you wanna come to mine we can, I'll just text my parents and let them know- unless Sam's is better."
She shrugs. "Whatever's fine with me, but we can talk more during lunch, we're cutting it close here."
"Alright, alright, remember to send me those scans if you can, if there's a chance we can find out more about this ghost I want us to be on top of it."
"Yep, no problem. See you guys in Bio?"
Danny shuts his locker and leans against it. "We'll see, depending on ghost-activity and all. Oh, and keep an eye out for Autumn too. I doubt she'll be here, but just in case."
TTTTTTTTTTT
As Sam and Tucker make their way to FentonWorks, a flash of light appears in an alleyway beside them. They stop at the opening and look down it disapprovingly.
Danny emerges with a happy look on his face, comforting to confusion when he sees his friends. "What? Ghost sense went off."
Sam smirks, a hint of criticism on her face. "You've never looked so excited to catch a ghost before. You feeling okay?"
"Feeling great! It's uh… good to be back, actually."
"Dude, you missed lunch too," Tucker adds. "and we didn't even see your ghost sense that time."
Danny scoffs. "Well, obviously it went off, uh, it's not like I would just-" his voice cracks. "I wouldn't run off like, in search of ghosts or- or…"
Tucker and Sam give him blank stares.
"Okay, well maybe I've been a little antsy lately, but it keeps people safe! I found a few ghosts wandering at the edges of town, they could still hurt people there too." He walks in front of his friends. "Now c'mon, there's actually some important stuff I found in Sam's book we should check out, but only after homework. I have a decent amount since I was gone a few days and-"
As Danny continues to nervously ramble on, Tucker leans towards Sam and whispers.
"Do you think we should be worried about this?"
"Not sure." She responds. "He seems pretty hyper, but maybe it's just from the trip, let's give it a few days."
"You guys know I can hear you perfectly well, right?"
TTTTTTTTTTTTT
"I'm home! I brought people!"
Danny holds the front door open for Sam and Tucker, swinging his backpack off of his shoulder in the meantime. Upon not getting a response, he shuts the door behind him and heads through the kitchen to the basement.
"Mom? Dad?" He calls out. "Did you get my text?"
Silence. His friends approach him from behind.
"Is Jazz gone too?" Sam asks, walking back over to the dinner table and plopping her backpack into a chair.
"No, she usually stays back at the school for after-class appointments and stuff." He slides his backpack off and starts digging through it.
"Maybe they just went shopping?" Tucker considers. "I know your parents aren't usually the type to be mundane and predictable, but I mean, it doesn't always have to be weird and cryptic all the time."
"They probably did, but that means I can dump these guys back in the Zone." He pulls a thermos out of his backpack and eyes the fill-meter on the side. "Gimme a second, I'll be right back."
Danny descends into the basement, using a bit of casual flight to make his way to the portal. He inserts the nozzle of the thermos into a receptacle connected to the side of the whirling vortex and presses a button, causing the container to empty.
Once finished, he pulls the thermos out of the machine and once again floats towards the stairs, but stops in midair- noticing something sitting on one of the lab tables.
"Hey, uh… guys?" He yells. "Mind coming down here? For a sec?"
A pair of footsteps descend the stairs.
"What's up?"
"Oh, dude."
Danny picks up the tracker, turning it over in his palm. "It's smaller than I thought it'd be." He mentions. "Usually their stuff is big and bulky, this is… surprisingly sleek."
"Do we want to steal it?" Sam asks.
"I don't know…" Danny flips the machine on, and a soft beep rings out. "It sounds like a good idea, doesn't it?"
"Well, if it works." Tucker adds. "Is it doing anything?" He peers over Danny's shoulder to get a better look at the small screen.
"It says it's on…" he turns it over again, frowning at the blank screen. He lifts it up into the air at the portal, and still nothing shows.
"Here, let me see." Sam holds her hand out, and Danny gives her the tracker. She fiddles with it, presses some buttons, but eventually raises it up towards Danny.
Her eyebrows raise. "Woah. Yeah, it works." Tucker swings around to look at the screen too, mouth forming into a surprised smile.
"That's so cool- it's a camera! It's-" he flails his hands around. "It's a camera that only shows ectoplasm, and it's surprisingly high-res."
Danny furrows his brow at his friend. "What does it show? I'm not even ghost right now."
"I… don't think that matters." Sam says. She pulls out her phone and takes a photo of the screen, and then hands it to Danny. She starts to scan the rest of the room after that.
Danny's expression falls even more. "Not good." He says.
The screen is pretty much completely black sans… well, him. It's not a perfect outline of him, nor an unidentifiable blob, but rather something that looks like a tangled road map of thin white lines all across his body, converging at a bright blue ball at his center.
"What even is this?" He asks to the room.
"Yeah, looks like it shows liquid ectoplasm, or something." Sam stands in front of one of his mother's refrigerated glass cabinets. "It's getting all the vials, at least of the active stuff." She adds.
"So… is it getting your veins? Or your nerves, that's what it looked like to me. It wasn't like the heat-signature thing we've seen in the past."
Sam approaches Danny again, who holds out his arm for her to scan more closely. She points it at his upper arm so he can see it as well.
"Yeah," her finger follows a visible vein on Danny's skin and compares it to one on the tracker. "It does look like its scanning your veins. That is where your liquid ectoplasm is."
"So wouldn't it be detecting my blood? It should be getting capillaries and stuff then too, right?"
Sam hums. "I'm not sure. Maybe it's-"
A door slams upstairs, causing all three of them to jump. Danny quickly swipes the device out of Sam's hand and pockets it.
"Danny? Are you home?" His mom calls out. "We went shopping, we can make homemade pizzas tonight for you and your friends!"
Danny lunges to grab Sam and Tucker's arms to intangibly pull them up to his bedroom, but his excessive strength pushes Tucker into one of the lab tables before intangibility can spread up his arm, causing a few lab tools to clatter to the ground. Danny cringes.
"Kids? Are you in the lab?" Maddie's soft steps can be heard calmly descending the stairs, and Danny rubs his face wearily.
"Yeah, we're here. Sorry, didn't hear you come in!"
He pulls the device out of his pocket and quietly sets it on the table. Tucker and Sam do their best to look nonchalant while picking up the tools that fell to the floor.
"What are you doing down here? Be careful what you touch, you know it's not the safest place in the world."
"Yeah sorry, we know. Um, I was trying to explain to Tuck what a volumetric flask is used for, we had a lab in Biology and we used them but he was still… confused." He gives Tucker an apologetic smile.
His friend huffs, but goes along with the ruse anyway. "Yeah, um… I wanted to see one actually being used. Danny said you had some."
"Oh of course! We have some in our lab refrigerators, we use them when we need a specific amount of solution at a specific temperature before use." She walks across the lab, and Tucker follows, looking interested and continuing their discussion.
Sam leans over to Danny and whispers. "Nice save. Do you wanna get outta here? You look nervous."
"I feel nervous." He responds, tapping his foot. "Is it that obvious?"
Sam nods. Danny sighs.
Danny's voice raises to a normal volume. "Sorry, Tuck, we're gonna get started on some of the homework I missed while I was gone, you okay with my mom explaining things?"
Tucker spins around and briefly narrows his eyes at them, but forces a smile. "Sure dude, I think I'm getting it now. I'll be up in a bit."
Danny and Sam nod in thanks, and head upstairs.
After another minute or so of Maddie explaining the functions of different flasks, Tucker thinks that it's enough.
"Thanks, Dr. Fenton, that helped a lot. I don't think Danny knew what he was talking about too well." He smiles at the light jab at his friend.
"Well, Danny is a smart boy, but he has trouble putting his mind to words. I'm sure he understood the correct functionality, just not how to convey that knowledge." They begin to walk back to the stairs, but Tucker falters when he sees the scanner sitting where Danny left it.
He takes a chance. "Hey Dr. F, what's this sleek piece of tech?" He points out the small machine and feigns interest.
"Oh, that! A combination of Jack and I's talents. It's a high-sensitivity ectoplasmic detector, complete with a visual feedback display." She turns it on and lifts it up, scanning around the lab and tilting the screen towards Tucker.
"So it's getting all the vials of ectoplasm. What does it show, exactly?"
"Active liquid ectoplasm, whether tangible or intangible. Its functionality is more suited to tracking, we can lock onto an ectosignature and filter it so we can only see that same source, if a ghost was wounded and fled the scene, we could easily pinpoint and follow it using this." She focuses the camera on a large vat of refrigerated ectoplasm and presses a few buttons. The majority of the other samples disappear, but when she swings over to the weapons rack, the guns and blasters light up like a Christmas tree.
"That large batch of ectoplasm is one we've solidified from ambient ghost zone fumes, which is what we primarily use in our weapons, so that ectosignature can be tracked to them."
Tucker holds his chin with his hand. "Huh, then does the portal light up too?" He already knows it doesn't, but not the reasoning why.
"No." Maddie presses a few more buttons on the machine, presumably to disable the tracking functionality. "The portal is-" she spins around once again, but halts her thought once the scanner lands on Tucker. She looks at the screen with confusion. "Huh." She says.
Tucker swallows, hoping he didn't make a really bad mistake. "Um, is there something wrong?"
Maddie presses a few more buttons, the beeps ringing in Tucker's ears. "Strange, you seem to be contaminated."
"Um, contaminated? By what?"
"I'm not sure… contamination shouldn't produce an ectosignature, or be able to be detected by this. Have you been in close contact with any ghosts lately? Or ectoplasm?"
Tucker's skin itches with the lingering feeling of intangibility that spread throughout his body not minutes ago. "No- I… I don't think so." He lies.
"I'll track the source." Maddie says, pressing a few more buttons. "Are you feeling any effects of ecto-contamination? Headaches, nausea, burns, rashes?"
"I-" he mentally checks himself over. "No, not that I can feel- but I don't think it's-"
"There we go." She lifts the device in the air, towards the second floor.
Where Danny is.
"No!" He yells. "I really, really, really don't think it's that big of a deal, you know it's probably just- a ghost attack! We- we had one the other day, and-"
"Well, that would explain why Sam has a signature too, at least I believe that's her."
Tucker reorients himself to look towards the tracker, and breathes a sigh of relief when it only has one, very faint reading of someone holding their hand on their hip and then crossing their arms. Definitely Sam.
"Um… yeah, that is her."
"Hmm, you're sure you're not feeling ill? Here, I'll send some medication for you to take home that should flush your system of ectocontamination." She turns off the tracker and sets it down, heading to one of the large metal cabinets. "It's possibly a bug in the software, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. Take these if you're feeling any symptoms, twice a day from-"
Tucker takes the bottle of pills in his hand and tones out the rest of whatever Maddie says, silently recovering from the reveal scare he just had. He mutters a quiet thank you after Maddie finishes talking and ascends the stairs slowly, feeling a huge weight hanging over him.
"Too close man, too, too close."
TTTTTTTTTTTTTT
Sam and Danny sit in his bedroom, quietly helping each other complete homework. In the short few minutes they've been up here Danny has managed to get quite a lot of work done, even though he keeps glancing at the large ghostspeak tone every few seconds.
"Sam, I'm just saying the homework can definitely wait, I've found-"
"Danny you've literally been up here for two minutes. The translation can also wait. Plus, Tucker's still talking to your mom-"
The door opens, and Tucker walks in with a strange, worried look on his face and holding an orange bottle of medication. Sam's and Danny both look at him. "You look like you've seen a ghost." The ghost says. Tucker rolls his eyes.
"Well, your mom almost saw a ghost, thanks to me. Thank god she didn't."
"Wait, what?" Danny asks, immediately alert. "What ghost? Me?"
Tucker nods. "I uh, wanted to see if she could leak any more information about the tracker so I got her to turn it on and explain some things. She passed it over me for a second and saw I was contaminated." He sits down on the bed next to Sam. "I thought it was from you making us intangible from earlier, but luckily it wasn't your ectosignature. She pointed it upstairs and we only saw Sam glowing on the thing, not you. I almost had a heart attack." He sighs and collapses backwards, and Sam shifts her legs to give him space.
"Well, it's good that Danny didn't glow, but why are we contaminated?"
"I have no clue. I don't feel contaminated, but she gave me pills anyways." He holds the bottle up and shakes it.
"The last ghost attack at the school was the Ember one, I think. She was giving off a lot of heat, but shouldn't we be clear by now?" Sam asks.
"Yeah, no, that shouldn't be it. It could still be mine, I did turn you intangible literally minutes before that, so it would make sense if you still had some ectoplasmic energy lingering on you. Why wouldn't it be my ectosignature though?" Danny rests his chin on his hand, thinking.
"Either way," Tucker says, "thank goodness it wasn't. I'm all for you letting your parents know your whole secret whenever you're ready, but I do not wanna be the one spill the beans for you, nuh uh."
Danny groans. "It definitely isn't reassuring knowing that she could tilt up that device and figure out my secret at any moment…" he sighs and drops his face in his book. "Is anywhere safe anymore?"
"We can head to my house instead if that makes you feel any better." Sam suggests. "It's far, but we could just fly, if you're up for it."
"You know," Danny says, "I really like that idea, but I don't want my parents to think something's up. They've already mentioned how I've been acting weird. I mean, they got pizza fixings for us to make them homemade, they obviously expect us to stay."
"I guess let's just hope they don't run in here guns blazing in an hour." Sam jokes. "Your parents are more of the 'shoot first dissect later' type, you know that."
Danny nods. "Yeah, but they're more compassionate than the GIW, at least they'll hesitate when they realize they're pointing a gun at me." He looks out the window. "Jazz should also be home soon too, which'll help."
They sit there for a bit, accepting Danny's decision. He quietly spins back around in his chair, resuming his homework.
His two friends exchange a short glance, but eventually do the same.
TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
"Alright!" Danny stands up from his desk and stretches. "Finished with homework, and only with one ghost interruption. Now to start translating this beast." He digs through his backpack and hefts the book up onto his desk. He opens it up in the center, looking for a specific page.
"By the way," Sam asks, closing her phone. "why is it so hard to translate? You can speak it perfectly fine, can't you?"
"Well... the thing about ghostspeak is that it doesn't have a written script, not really. Some choose to write in it, like ghostwriter and stuff, but they invented that, and it changes from region to region like normal language. What Freakshow did was write out the sounds of the speech with some writer's script, um… imagine if you wrote out English words phonetically using like, Arabic or Japanese. You would have to know Arabic and English, read each word phonetically in Arabic, and then sound it out to figure out what the English word is supposed to be. Someone must've taught him how to speak it and then he found an alphabet later, somehow. It's all wrong."
Tucker shakes his head and looks to the ceiling. "Wouldn't translating be crazy hard then? For Arabic and English, I'm pretty sure they don't even have the same sounds, so how would it translate if they don't have that sound as a letter?"
"Well, it is hard, that's what I'm saying." Danny flips through a few more pages. "But ghostspeak has more sounds than probably… um, any language I bet. It's got aspects from all of them, so that's not really the problem. The problem is Freakshow not actually knowing what he's doing. Honestly, he should have just wrote a normal book." He grumbles.
"Here, this is what I wanted to show you." Danny steps over to the bed and sets the book between the three of them. "You see how this is a list? There aren't any illustrations, but this is an example of how to summon a ghost- it doesn't have any specifics of things you need, so you can't actually summon someone with this, but…"
"But we know it's possible." Tucker finishes. "You think he used this somehow? To summon a ghost?"
"Wait, hold on a second." Sam lies her hand on the pages of the book. "We don't know how accurate this is at all. It's Freakshow."
"Freakshow's been right about a lot of things Sam. We might've put him in custody of the GIW, but that doesn't mean his information was wrong."
"Well, if we say that this is true, and the girl had a ghostspeak book with summons in it, then she actually might want them there." Sam crosses her arms and leans back on the headboard. "Which means she's at fault, too."
"I really hope that's not the case. And after what she's been through..." Danny sighs. "This could've been avoided."
"Every villain's got a tragic backstory Danny. Don't you read any comics?"
"This isn't a comic Tuck." Danny snaps. "This is real."
"He has a point though. You can't save everyone." Sam adds. "Sometimes it can cause more harm than good to try."
"Doesn't mean I'm not gonna."
Danny shuts the book and goes back to his desk, opening up a new document. "I'm gonna fully translate anything in here having to do with summoning, and then I'm going to translate anything on long-term possession, see if it'll have lasting negative effects on her."
"Do we have a game plan besides that? It seems like they've been laying low." Tucker says. "Although we do have her address, we could take the fight to them."
"I don't know." Danny replies. "This whole thing is messy. I might head over there for more information-gathering this week- forget about being unnoticed, we have to figure out this ghost's motive."
Sam checks her watch and stands up, walking over to Danny and setting a hand on his shoulder.
"We should take a break." She says. "Wanna make some pizzas?"
Danny rips his eyes from the book to look up at her and smiles, taking a deep sigh and leaning back in his computer chair.
"Yeah, I'm starving."