Valerie's knees rattled as her thighs shook. For upwards of three hours she stood on her hoverboard in optimal balancing position, feet apart and knees bent, as she zoomed back and forth across the sky.

She didn't know how much longer she could stay standing.

Even without taking into account her current predicament, Valerie hadn't gotten a proper night's sleep in weeks. Her diet had been eighty percent protein shake. The messy stitches in her right arm- the ones she had to do with her nondominant left- were starting to come apart. The sticky wetness of blood seeped down her arm and stuck to her heat dried skin, trapped under her armor and starting to itch.

With a sweep that left her parallel to the ground, she accelerated the board enough to clear a block in ten seconds, cutting through the vines that had been spreading forward. They fell to the ground, landing on piles of other severed plant parts.

Underneath her, Norman street was more rubble than town, nothing but blocks of concrete and torn up pavement and greenery. The caved in streets left the sewer system open to the air, and a visible miasma rose through the streets. Valerie's altitude and the filter on her suit kept her from getting the worst of it, but no doubt the entire city was smelling it by now.

Things were technically better when she turned to the eastern front. The vines had managed to take another block while she occupied herself with the other side, but the spiraling temperatures the weather ghost conjured froze them in place.

The suit's temperature regulation, however, gave a shuddering buzz as it started to fail her; confused by the rapid cycling between burning arid dryness on one side and blizzard force chills on the other. It took longer and longer to adjust with each loop, leaving her joints to stiffen as she circled the fight. The blood stuck under her suit began to freeze, rapidly sapping her body temperature.

A vine came barreling towards her, spikes first, and Valerie executed a barrel roll to avoid it. The brief moment she was upside down gave her legs too much of a reprieve, though. The minuscule break left them unwilling to hold her weight up any longer. Once upright again, her knees buckled, leaving her kneeling on her board and diving towards the ground at breakneck speed. She only managed to pull away from the impact in time because all the buildings were already leveled.

Valerie got the board back under control but stayed on all fours. It made maneuvering more difficult, but her shaking legs told her any attempt to stand again would be meet with mutiny.

She turned again in her eternal circle, out of the blizzard and into the blasting heat. In seconds her skin dripped with sweat, down her back and chest and between the gears of her suit. Her lungs and throat burned. The need to rip the plates of armor off her chest so she could free the blood that was making her hand tacky and fingers stiff filled her.

"Get a hold of yourself, Gray," she muttered as her board sliced through more never-ending vines.

She was so tired. Tired of circles, tired of vines, tired of ghosts and of school and of screaming.

Salt irritated her cheeks. Her eyes stung. She didn't think sweat had anything to do with it.

The circles, despite being ten blocks wide, started to make her dizzy. Hot, cold, hot, cold, hot cold...

She wondered what would happen if she passed out on the hoverboard. Would it keep circling in an eternal cycle until a vine swatted her out of the air? Or would it immediately divebomb the ground in one final hurrah, leaving behind nothing but wires and powdered bone?

A minute later, upon circling back into the drought zone, she felt the heat let up somewhat.

On the next cycle, it did even more so.

For a moment, relief tired to bubble up in her gut. Then the suit started to hum and vibrate like an overheated computer and she had a thought. Could ectoplasmic energy do the opposite? Could it underheat? Or overcool? Or however it would be said?

Either way, whatever the reason, the functions on the suit began to lag with stuttered stops. Her hoverboard shook and swerved without warning. For half a second she went into a heart-stopping free fall. When it regained equilibrium, the jets propelled her at least a couple miles per hour slower than she remembered.

Was it funny that she had never thought to ask where exactly the ectoplasm that, she presumed, powered her suit came from? It seemed important now that her board threatened to fall a hundred feet out of the sky towards the rubble wasteland that she used to call her hometown.

Another vine zapped towards her with a whistle. This time, though, the lower speed lessened the effectiveness of her usual barrel roll dodge. She ended up miscalculating the velocity and making the flip too shallow. The resulting impact to her shoulder flew through her entire body, sending her and her board backward. When she had settled again the unyielding metal of her board pressed against the more flexible pieces of her knee joints. Burgundy sky, rather than ghosts and rubble, filled the field of her visor.

The impact and changed jarred her enough to delay the inevitable. It caught up to her again when she brought her hand up to the shoulder that took the hit.

A loud squelch echoed in her ears as her hand sunk through something soft. One second, two seconds... the muscle exploded.

The world flashed white. Her breath caught in her tight throat. The shadowy green figure of Undergrowth towered over her by several stories as he screeched and fought the too bright figure of the weather ghost. Lightening and thunder shook the air as much as the ground.

The top of her board became slippery with blood that trickled down her thighs.

Blood from her shoulder. Her shoulder where the vine had skimmed without losing any of its momentum, tearing through flesh and muscle as it drilled through the top of her clavicle. Under her hand, pulverized bone fragments stuck to peeled skin and cleaved muscle. Her arm hung like a stuffed toy a child had started to tear apart.

Valerie screamed.

She screamed at the sky, she screamed at these fighting titans to whom which she was a mosquito at best and a germ at worst. She screamed at her right shoulder for being hit, she screamed at herself for being stupid… She screamed at Phantom for leaving. She screamed at herself for maybe, perhaps, being wrong about things.

Valerie screamed because no backup was coming. She was alone. For all she knew, she was the last line of defense and… and ghost hunting wasn't about the ghosts, was it? It didn't matter if she destroyed these ghosts or not. What mattered… what mattered was that if they went any further people were going to get hurt. What mattered was that if they weren't stopped people would die… that was a truth Phantom had always known, wasn't it?

But it didn't matter anymore.

Valerie screamed, one hand on her shoulder. Then she focused her eyes down at the ever-encroaching vines and tucked her left hand against her body with movements that betrayed every severed nerve ending.

Valerie was alone, so she grit her teeth and continued forward, head pounding, joints shaking, and shoulder burning. She would stop this because she had to. But, as blood dripped down her side and the smell of stale iron clogged her nose, she knew if she made it out of this alive, she would never be able to bring herself to put this suit on again without remembering this moment. Maybe she would never put it on at all.

…:::*::...

Hours after the fighting started, at the very steps of City Hall after having gained roughly twenty feet in three hours, Maddie Fenton fell. The ghosts had learned their lesson from the first time and immediately rushed forward to hold down her arms and legs. Instead of a stun gun, a taser connected by wires to her bicep. The ghost holding it floated out of reach above her stomach.

As Maddie watched, the expressionless monster pressed the trigger. After a second of limbo spent knowing the pain was coming and tensing up every nerve, the volts ripped through her. Her muscles revolted from her control as her voice rose in pained crescendo.

"Maddie! Maddie!" Jack screamed his wife's name as a green beam shot up from his position, knocking two ghosts into a light post where they crumpled, melting into ectoplasmic puddles.

That was Jack's last shot.

He hardly paid it any mind as he rushed forward, eyes on where Maddie arched against the pavement. As he ran, a dozen ghost guards jumped on him and attempted to drag him down from the arms and legs. His intact suit left nowhere for a taser to get through beside the very small target of his jaw, so they relied on brute strength in numbers as they piled onto him. Jack took one step and then another, pulling against the overwhelming force of the ectoplasmic beings. As a large man, his sheer momentum and determination in comparison to the barely corporeal bodies and mental awareness of ghosts kept him moving forward for longer than he had any right too. In the end, though, he had to adhere to the boxing idiom: the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

One of the ghosts popped up from the ground and grabbed Jack's ankles with an inescapable tug. Jack fell under the weight, and, with his arms held back and his feet immobilized, the fall hit hard.

His jaw bounced against the concrete. A puddle of blood began to form.

"Jack!" Maddie screamed. She took back what she said about the scariest millisecond of her life. This was it, this moment where she screamed his name and received only silence… and then a groan. A small one, but a groan nonetheless.

"Ah, ah, ah, a wife's devotion to his husband is important, but it's not him you want to be worrying about, girlie. Give it another go," ordered the skeleton ghost in the white suit as he approached his hostage once more.

Again, Maddie's torso arched as her nerves seized. She could hear her own screams, but she wasn't sure they escaped her head.

When it stopped, her back fell again, the concrete unforgiving against her already bruised muscles. The warden tilted his head and the green lights in his eye sockets flared.

"Interesting. I think this just might work on that blasted halfa. It's not what we came here to do, but no harm in taking some spoils after we deal with the escapee, right boys?"

The ghosts cheered. The skull looked back down at her, less blinding white than earlier as the sky began to go from magenta to mauve.

"Took us a while to get this one right, sweetie. It's not real electricity, you know. More of a nerve gas. It attacks the receptors in those pesky human brains. Confudles them until they can only assume every touch is pain. In other words… it's all in your head, ghost hunter,"

Oh.

Phantom looked up at her with a child's eyes as he lay restrained to the lab table. As soon as she made eye contact with his strong gaze, she threw her fist down on a large red button next to her. Immediately hundreds of volts of homemade 'ghost electricity' lit up the cuffs that attached the ghost to the table, and promptly flowed into him, causing him to scream at the sudden pain as he broke eye contact, violently arching his back off the table in a subconscious search for an escape. Maddie watched apathetically as sparks of slightly green electricity sporadically traveled along his body and melted into his 'skin'.

After a few seconds, she let go of the button, and he fell with a 'thud' right back onto the table, panting loudly and eyes wide and startled…

"What–" it was all the specter was able to get out before Maddie turned a dial to up the strength, and threw her hand back down on the button. He was interrupted by his own scream.

"I don't care what you think, you putrid protoplasm," Maddie spoke right over his fake cries of agony.

Because that's what they were, fake. Ghost's derived physical feeling from remainders of their physical lives. Ectoplasm didn't have nerves, it couldn't feel pain, it could only mimic echoes. It could only replicate what it remembered in a pathetic attempt to replicate life.

In other words...

"It's all in your head, ghost."

Oh.

She wondered, even if they hadn't chased Phantom off, would he have rescued her from this?

His eyes were so big. His body was so small. If ghosts created themselves out of self-image, was that how he saw himself? Small?

And yet, he had never seemed that way to Amity Park. He had always faced monsters like this with an attitude that made him seem as big as they were.

In the past few months, Maddie had gained plenty of experience in those shoes, thrown around by monsters more powerful than she could ever be.

News to no one, but it hurt to be thrown against a building like a ragdoll.

She wondered how much more it hurt to be thrown through a building.

She wondered how many times it happened to Phantom on a weekly basis.

She wondered at the nature of pain.

Was it a feeling or an emotion?

What did it mean to say it was all in your head?

Did that make it any less real?

"Hmm. I've got an idea." The ghost placed his heeled boot against her heaving chest, between her breasts and therefore holding down her torso by the sternum. "Hit it, boys."

When the electric current started and her chest found itself pinned, unable to arch, her neck picked up the slack. Her head snapped forward with the tensing of her neck muscles and then back as they relaxed, impacting the concrete with enough force to feel her brain knock. Everything went fuzzy and her scream cut off in favor of a gasp of breath.

Another spasm traveled from her toes to her head, finding release in the only part of her that could move. This time, when her head came back down she didn't even feel it.

Instead, everything went dark.

"Maddie!"

A/N: The ghost hunters are hurt. oh no. the horror. -.-

lol.

As always, reviews appreciated. I am still stunned about the reception this fic is still getting. you're all great. :-)