Science Experiment
A Danny Phantom Fanfiction by Cordria
"Mom?" Danny poked his head through the door leading to the basement lab.
"Down here!" came the echoing shout.
Danny closed his eyes and focused, intending on practicing his new-found ability to teleport.
"Walk down the stairs, young man. I have an experiment going."
With a sigh and a roll of his eyes, Danny slunk down the stairs to the basement laboratory and wove his way through the metal tables and piles of clutter. His mother was sitting next to small beaker with a sample of ectoplasm in the bottom. Above the beaker hovered some long, tall, test tube-like thing that also had ectoplasm in it. As Danny watched, his mother twisted the knob at the bottom of the test tube thing and a drop of ectoplasm fell into the beaker. She clicked a button on the computer, then glanced at him.
"What do you need, Sweetie?"
"What are you doing?" Pulling over a chair, Danny watched as his mother let out another drip of ectoplasm and clicked the button on the computer. After some of the crazier experiments his parents had told him about the last few months, Danny was interested in what she was doing.
His mother handed him a pair of goggles. "You know how ectoplasm, when in a large enough quantity, will spontaneously become sentient?"
Danny blinked and said, "Yeah," even as he was trying to remember was sentient meant. Didn't it have something to do with a brain?
"Jack and I are trying to determine the exact amount of ectoplasm needed for that to happen." She leaned forwards, let out another drop of ectoplasm, clicked the button on her computer, and sat back in her chair again.
Still not sure what sentient meant, Danny stared at the lab equipment for a long moment. "So you're putting the ectoplasm from the big test tube-"
"Titration burette," she corrected.
"-into the beaker one drop at a time until it… becomes sentient?"
His mother glanced at him with a grin, then chuckled. "You look just like your father did when he was younger with those goggles on." She patted him on the knee, then said, "What did you need?"
"How long is that going to take?" Danny asked, gesturing towards the beaker and big test tube setup.
"It took 2,048 drops last time." Again the drip oozed into the beaker.
Danny thought about how slowly she was putting in the drops. "And that took…"
"At one drip every 30 seconds? Slightly over seventeen hours."
Danny stared at the tiny amount of ectoplasm in the beaker. His parents often invested a lot of time into their experiments, but this seemed excessive. "How many drops into it are you?"
She peered at the computer. "687. We're almost to the six hour mark."
"So you've got a long ways to go." He leaned forwards, resting his arms on the lab table and watching another drop ooze downwards.
"We'll be done sometime tomorrow morning."
"When are you going to sleep?"
"Jack and I are switching off shifts all night." Another drip. Behind her, the Portal swirled sedately.
Being part ghost, Danny knew the pull of the Ghost Zone and it's effect on ectoplasm. "Does the Portal have anything to do with it? Like, how close you are?"
His mother smiled. "That's another variable we'll need to test, yes. But you can only change one variable at a time. We need to figure out the average number at this position first."
"How many times do you have to run this experiment?"
"A statistically significant number of times." Drip.
"How many is that?" Danny wondered.
His mother crossed her arms and frowned. "Still up for debate. Jack is in the fifteen range, while I'm voting for closer to twenty."
Danny blinked at her. "You're going to run a seventeen hour experiment twenty times?"
Drip. She grinned at him. "And then we'll move it closer to the Portal and try it again. Then further away. And we need to test it with purified ectoplasm, and with refined ectoplasm-"
The thought of how much time this experiment would take made Danny's jaw drop. "How much are you getting paid to do this?"
His mother shrugged a shoulder. "This is one of our pet projects."
As far as Danny was aware, 'pet project' equaled 'not getting paid.' He stared at her, befuddled by why anyone would want to do this. "Why?"
"So we know how much ectoplasm can go into our large-capacity cartridges before it becomes sentient and eats something," she answered blandly.
There was that word again – sentient – but Danny didn't pause to contemplate it. "That sounds beyond boring."
Drip. "It does give me a lot of time to work on our theoretical equations," she said, pointing to a notepad covered in numbers and letters and strange math symbols. "Jack is determined to find the equivalent of the Theory of Relativity for the ghost world." She shook her head with a small smile on her face, like what she had said was some sort of joke Danny didn't catch. "What did you need?"
Still caught up in staring at his mother's seemingly endless experiment, Danny shook his head. He hadn't really needed anything; he'd just been bored and looking for something to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon. "I don't remember," he muttered, watching as his mother put another drop into the beaker. "You're seriously going to sit down here for days just doing this?"
"Yes, Sweetie." She cocked an eyebrow, a teasing smile on her lips. "Did you want to help?"
"Not a chance." He wasn't that bored. He reached out with a finger and tapped the beaker with the ectoplasm in it. He'd been hoping for some ripples or oozing goo, but what he got was a stirring in the glop. Little flickers of light – just for a second – and something that looked like an amoeba arm stretching upwards towards his finger.
The slow breath leaking out of his mother's nose made Danny wince. "Sweetheart," she said, a tone to her voice that made her sound like she was trying to hold back frustration. "One variable at a time. We're not testing how ectoplasm reacts to you."
"Sorry," he murmured as his mother took the beaker and dumped it out, guiltily realizing that he had just reset an experiment she had just spent six hours working on. "I didn't…"
"I know," she said. Her fingers rested in his hair for a moment. "It's okay. It was time for a break anyways. Let's go upstairs – I'll let you win another game of checkers."
Danny scowled at her. "You don't have to let me win. I won fair and square last time."
She smiled. "If you say so."
She headed for the stairs, but Danny stayed in his seat. "So… if your experiment is done…" he called after her.
"Fine," she said, waving a hand behind her.
Danny grinned and closed his eyes, focusing on the empty, cold feeling deep inside of him. With a quick snap of his mind, Danny found himself suddenly falling. His eyes opened, his hands and legs flailed out to catch him just before he hit the ground. "Misjudged it again," he muttered, looking around the living room. Based on the fall, he must have appeared near the ceiling.
Checkers game in hand, his mother appeared in the living room. "Practice makes perfect," she said. "At least you got the right room this time." She sat down on the couch. "Ready?"
Leaping over the back of the couch, Danny settled down and started arranging the black pieces. "You're on."
His mother hummed as an almost evil smirk crossed her face. "You first."
The look on his mother's face made Danny hesitate. Perhaps she had let him win last time. But he wasn't going to let her see him squirm. Confidently, he reached out and moved one of his pieces, sat forwards, and said, "I'm getting better at this. You'd better watch yourself."
"In your dreams, ghost boy," his mother murmured and moved her pieces.