Author's Note: I own nothing.
3 Researching The Impossible
The only problem with Sam's plan was that Dani didn't show up to school the next day. They cornered Jazz at lunch and she admitted that her parents had wanted to keep Dani home in case there were any side effects from being so close to the portal when it opened. She was tutoring after school though so she entrusted them with the task of taking Dani the homework she missed. So at the end of the school day Sam and Tanya headed to Fenton Works only to find it mostly dark. Tanya pulled out the spare key and they entered to a ringing silence that was more than foreboding. Slipping inside they called out, voices echoing through the house. In a moment something fell, but not from the stairs, from the ceiling, no through it. The figure landed with a thump and a loud curse.
"Oww ow oww!" Sam and Tanya raced forward, that was Dani.
"Are you ok!" They practically said it in unison and Dani looked up at them eyes glowing eerily in the dark. She wasn't even transformed but her eyes glowed bright green looking practically radioactive in their frustration. They reached out and helped her to her feet. She looked up at them a deep frown on her face. She was still in her pajamas, a NASA logo t-shirt proclaiming 'I need Space' and a pair of loose shorts. Her skin was slightly cool to the touch and she shook her head, pushing her hair out of her face.
"This is the third time I've fallen through my floor. I almost got caught the second time, and only didn't because I turned invisible and couldn't figure out how to turn back. So you know, that's my day so far." Sam gently steered her to the couch.
"Well that answers if you can do ghost stuff when you're human." Sam said trying to lighten the mood.
"I can't seem to turn it off." Dani said hiccupping. Sam wrapped an arm around her as Tanya paced.
"Are your parents home?" Tanya asked and Dani shook her head.
"Do you think I'd be this calm if the ghost hunters I live with were home while I'm falling through the ceiling? They got a call. Some 'spectral activity' in Elmerton. They said that since I hadn't experienced any side effects from the portal that they were gonna go check it out and bring home dinner when they were done." Tanya nodded.
"Where are the plans for the Ghost Portal?" Dani and Sam blinked at their friend.
"Umm. If mom put them away probably in the third drawer of the filing cabinet. If dad put them away god knows." Tanya nodded, tuned on her heel and raced down the stairs to the lab. Sam and Dani blinked at each other for a second before Dani quite literally slipped through Sam's fingers to follow Tanya. She hesitated at the top of the stairs.
"You don't have to go down there." Sam insisted but Dani shook her head.
"I'm not letting Tanya go down there alone. Who knows what damage that portal could do, that it hasn't done already." But Sam could see Dani's distress in the way her feet barely brushed the carpet. As she took a wholly unnecessary step onto the stairs the ring of light bloomed around her middle and she again changed into the more ghostlike form. But this time something new happened. Her legs seemed to fuse together into a whisp that curled and vanished. She was flying down the stairs, not just floating. Sam blinked following her. They found Tanya digging in the drawer Dani had specified. In a moment she pulled out a file in triumph.
"Ah-ha!" She turned to head back up the stairs and screamed. Dani flinched back slightly.
"What!" Tanya let out a breath.
"It's not nice to sneak up on people as a ghost." Tanya said pushing her glasses up her nose. "Also since when can you fly?" Dani blinked and looked down. She gasped but there was an edge of excitement to it.
"I'm flying?" She whirled in the air. "Holy shit guys I'm flying!" It was nice to see excitement back on her face as she spun through the air and right through the ceiling. Tanya and Sam blinked at each other as the echoing laughter faded. Not wasting a moment they ran up the stairs, following the echoing laughter up to the roof access door. They found her hanging onto the satellite dish giggling like mad. "Guys I don't know how to get down!" Sam scrambled up the dish and grabbed her hand.
"Ok take a deep breath. You weren't flying in the living room so think back to how that felt?" He was sort of grasping at straws but it seemed to help as she floated down and her feet finally reappeared and touched the ground. Sam climbed back down and smiled. He reached into the leather jacket he'd worn for the day and pulled out a black notebook. On the front cover were the words 'Not Today Satan' in dripping red lettering. Dani frowned at the book. Sam popped it open, it looked like it was full of his neat curving handwriting.
"I was up all night doing research on Spirits and Specters." Tanya nodded.
"Same, but I did not take as many notes as Sam but maybe we can make some sense of what the portal was supposed to do and figure out what went wrong from there." Dani stared at them and lunged forward pulling them both into a hug.
"Thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me. I thought I was alone." Sam and Tanya returned the hug.
"Never." Sam assured as Dani, still ghostly, grinned at him. She was still a good six inches shorter than him. Tanya pecked Dani on the cheek.
"We'd never leave you alone, you're stuck with us!" Dani laughed, the white lights flashed and she returned to herself. "Now I say we grab some snacks, head to your room and try and work this out!" Dani nodded grinning at them, her eyes fading back to their familiar sky blue for the first time since they'd arrived.
They ended up following Tanya's suggestion to the letter. Once they'd gathered their snacks and settled down in Dani's room Sam cracked the notebook back open.
"Ok so Tobin's Spirit Guide was the most helpful guide wise anyway. Less, here's how to hunt the supernatural and more here's what this is." Dani bit into an apple and nodded.
"Yeah I get the feeling I'm gonna get more 'how to hunt the supernatural' lectures now that stupid portal is working." Sam nodded and flipped to the first page of notes.
"The general consensus about ghosts is they're made of two things. Post-human consciousness, sort of an echo of the dead." Sam said reading off the notes. Dani nodded and spoke around her bite of apple.
"Yeah mom was lecturing Jazz and me about that the other day. I honestly sort of tuned her out after a while though. Never thought I'd need it. The other thing is ectoplasm right?" Sam nodded.
"Yeah though no one seems to know exactly what it is." Sam commented and Tanya clicked her tongue.
"Your parents have a few thoughts about that. Your mom's notes on the ghost portal say it might be a substance from a pocket dimension, often referenced as the Afterlife." Tanya shook her head. "You know in context this is heavy shit." Dani shrugged.
"I died yesterday. I'm not sure it gets worse than that." Tanya nodded and continued.
"There's a few bold notes here about double-checking notes and making sure you use the ecto-purifier. 'Do not want a repeat of last time with the ecto-acne'. What's ecto-acne?" Tanya asked frowning up at Dani who ran a self-conscious hand over her face.
"Hopefully something I don't have to worry about." She shook her head absently scratching at the bandage on her burned hand. Sam flipped a page in his notes.
"What do the plans say about ectoplasm Tanya? Cause that comes up most in all of the books I could get my hands on." She flipped a few pages and made a noise of triumph at the back of her throat.
"Ah here we go. Your mom's notes are almost as good as Sam's. 'In theory this device will allow access into the fabled 'Ghost Zone' which is often referred to as the Afterlife in literature though this is technically a misnomer as it is unlikely that all post-human consciousness manifests as a ghost, spirit or phantom." She skipped down the page. " 'According to the brief scans collected from the original portal'…" She paused looking up at Dani. "Original portal?"
"No idea." Dani said hovering over to Tanya, though if her powers were manifesting from stress or excitement this time was less clear. "This is the first one they ever made here." The Fenton's had moved to Amity Park years ago when Jazz was a small child, before Dani was even born. Tanya frowned but went back to the notes.
" 'According to the brief scans collected from the original portal the 'Ghost Zone' is comprised entirely of ectoplasm.' " Dani sat back with a frown.
"I was in the portal when it went off. I got exposed to all of the ectoplasm in the Ghost Zone at once and it killed me."
"Technically it only half killed you." Tanya said trying to be helpful. Dani ran her hands through her hair. "It's sort of like a literal version of Schrodinger's cat. In the Ghost Zone it killed you, but you survived here on Earth."
"I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse." Dani commented scrubbing at her face. Sam frowned opening his mouth but before he could say anything there was a clatter from downstairs and Dani dropped back to the sheets of her bed. As she did though she opened her mouth and a bright blue mist, like something that came off of dry ice flowed from her mouth. She clapped both hands over her mouth but it flowed out from between her fingers. She blinked. Sam and Tanya frowned.
"That wasn't in any of the books." Sam said and Tanya shrugged. Dani pulled her hands away to say something but another flow of blue mist emerged instead and the room grew a touch colder. It was then that something rose from the floor. It was tiny a little green blob with dripping ears that sort of looked like they maybe belonged to a rabbit at one point. Black, empty eyes looked around the room and Dani tilted her head at the creature.
"It's a bunny." She stepped off the bed, not seeming to notice that Tanya and Sam had both flinched away from the thing. She knelt down on her floor and carefully held out a hand, not even realizing it was her burned one. The bunny seemed to nose at the air, though there wasn't really a visible nose on the rabbit, the only thing that defined it as such was the ears. Tension filled the room, though Dani seemed unusually calm about it. Then the bunny hopped right into her hand. It was tiny though it did seem to drip ectoplasm, Sam wasn't looking forward to cleaning that up. "You're harmless aren't you?" Dani said smiling at the tiny blob in her hand. It made a noise, that sort of grated on Sam and Tanya's ears like nails on a chalkboard or static from a tv but Dani didn't seem to hear it.
Instead a similar sound slipped out of her mouth like it was nothing, maybe she just hadn't noticed like with the flying in the lab. But her eyes weren't glowing this time. She turned to Sam and Tanya with a reassuring smile and spoke, but there weren't words. She frowned as they stared at her.
"Dani, we can't understand you. I think you might be speaking Ghost." Sam deadpanned, not sure how to soften that blow. Dani frowned down at the blob in her hand which nodded as if affirming that, yes this strange teen who was holding a ghost in her hand was also speaking the ghost's native tongue. Tanya frowned.
"Does this mean you can speak Latin? It's a dead language too." Dani barked out a laugh and the world seemed to snap into some form of familiarity. Sam couldn't hold in his own laughter and the three of them dissolved into giggles Dani still holding the blob of bunny.