A/N: Happy birthday again, Bibliophilea!

Once safely back at the Mystery Shack, Wendy turned off the golf cart and grabbed her supplies from the rack in the back. It had been a bumpy ride, but she'd only needed to sacrifice one bag of marshmallows to the forest. That wasn't bad, considering how many creatures she was fairly sure lived there.

And, fine, maybe it made her a little paranoid to think that some of the bumps she'd hit had been deliberate, a growth of tree roots just so or deep holes suspiciously covered with leaf litter, but it wasn't like she voiced her thoughts to anyone else.

Besides, whatever lived in the forest seemed happy with the occasional sacrifice of candy. At the very least, she'd never been stopped by something yet, and she took a lot of shortcuts through here by herself. That wasn't exactly recommended, even for those who knew the territory well. When her family went out for apocalypse training, they were supposed to pair off. They didn't always, but they did more often than not.

It's easier to survive if there's someone you trust around to watch your back, but you have to know how to fight if there isn't.

Whatever had stopped by the Mystery Shack wasn't bringing the apocalypse with it—she was pretty sure about that—but she didn't want this to turn into that. Taking the twins to see the haunted grocery store? Sure. She still hadn't been sure they'd actually see ghosts despite the stories—no one had been until it had happened—but that was different. That was contained. That was very much not in the Mystery Shack. Where the kids slept. With only the oblivious skeptic Stan around to fight the things that went bump in the night.

Now, if those things were corporeal, she wouldn't be concerned. The man knew how to punch, and he'd punch before asking questions. But whatever had turned up this time clearly had the option to not be corporeal. Like a ghost.

She remembered the footprints appearing in the scattered baking soda a split second before the boy who'd visited earlier appeared. The same boy who had flashed a careless grin and flipped through postcards and keychains and magnets in the gift shop before taking a tour with Mabel.

Whatever he was, he wasn't a ghost, but he was entirely too much like a ghost for comfort.

There was no sign of Stan yet—not a surprise; she hadn't heard his car—but chances were good he wasn't far behind her.

She saw Soos walking in from the lane and raised her hand in a wave. He spotted her and held a finger to his lips before pointing, and something cold and heavy settled in her gut as she spotted three figures by the woodshed: Mabel, Dipper, and the not-a-ghost boy who'd called himself Danny.

She cursed under her breath as she hurried to meet Soos. "That's him," she hissed. "We need to get him away from the twins."

"Did you find anything in town that we can use?"

"I bought a couple more boxes of salt." Silver was expensive—too expensive for her, anyway—and she wasn't exactly guaranteed to find holy water even if she tried breaking into a church, mostly because she didn't know where she'd look for it. She could've bought a cast iron frying pan, but she might as well grab one from the kitchen. The ideas of what they might be able to do had quickly fallen apart when she'd realized what was actually feasible. "It's better than nothing."

"What about garlic?"

"For a ghost?"

"You said he wasn't a ghost."

"Close enough to a ghost. And, anyway, there should be some in the kitchen. We can always chop up a couple of cloves and see if it does anything." If it didn't, and they didn't waste it, they could always throw it into hamburger meat or make garlic bread. "How long has he been here? The kid?"

"Just a couple of minutes," Soos allowed, "but this isn't the first time the kids have met him."

Wendy closed her eyes. "I know, I just…. I'd hoped they wouldn't realize he wasn't normal." More to the point, she'd hoped that he wouldn't come back. What the hell did he want, anyway? Sure, he'd said something about fixing whatever was wrong, but their ideas about what needed fixing weren't likely the same.

"They might not. He was pretending to be normal when he talked to me."

"He talked to you?"

"Just to ask after Dipper and Mabel."

Wendy frowned. Soos didn't sound too optimistic that Mabel and Dipper wouldn't realize there was something weird about the kid, and frankly, she thought he was right. Mabel might be more forgiving, but Dipper…. "We'll play it cool. Keep doing whatever you were doing. Try to keep an eye on them without being too obvious about it. I'll prepare the fire pit."

"The wood, campfire forks, hot dogs, marshmallows—?"

His gaze had wandered pointedly down to the box of salt pressing against the white plastic bag she carried, its blue label clearly visible. "Yeah. I won't ring it thickly enough that it's noticeable, especially since it'll have to be in the gravel where nothing's growing anyway, but if he's going to pretend to be normal, then we'll see how long he can keep that up."

"And if he's not affected by the salt?"

"We cross that bridge when we come to it."

"And if we're wrong and he is normal after all?"

Wendy snorted. "If he's normal, he's only normal for here." She saw Soos shift uncomfortably and added, "If Stan comes back before I'm finished, give him the pitch about taking measures to ghost-proof the Mystery Shack and advertising doing that because it's haunted. He'll know how to get more of what we need, even if he doesn't think it'll do anything."

"What if he's not bad? The kid, I mean. Not everything is bad. Not everyone is bad."

The kid had claimed he wasn't a threat. He'd said he was stuck, that he just wanted to go home, that he had to fix something, not break it. What if it hadn't been a lie? She didn't see how his sneaking around could mean his intentions were honourable, but that didn't mean she wasn't missing something.

On the other hand, if he were simply determined to show a friendly face to the twins to get them to lower their guard, only to strike once he'd fooled them—

Wendy wasn't sure if she wanted to take that risk. Having a healthy amount of suspicion now and apologizing later sounded much better to her than being overly trusting and being burned—especially if she wouldn't be the only one caught in that fire. She and Soos had lived their entire lives here. Mabel and Dipper had not. They might not yet appreciate the degree to which not everything was as it appeared.

"You don't need to be ready to attack," Wendy finally said. "You just need to be ready to defend." Soos nodded, maybe thinking her words were for both of them, but they weren't. She had no intentions of simply being ready to defend. She wasn't about to attack unprovoked, but if this kid did anything that set off alarm bells for her, she'd act on her gut. She trusted her gut more than her head. It was reliable in these sorts of situations.

The trouble was, her gut should have made a call on this already. Instead, she was still conflicted, and more time to mull it over on her trip into town hadn't helped. Part of her still wanted to take the kid's words at face value, but the little she'd seen of what he could do backed up the part of her that insisted he was far too dangerous to blindly trust. Soos wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but there was so much that could seem innocuous at first….

The knowledge that Soos was right and they had no idea if salt would actually help defend them didn't make this any easier—especially when Danny was clearly interested in Mabel and Dipper. Soos had mentioned Dipper having a book, and she remembered seeing glimpses of it before. If that's what the kid was interested in, how was she supposed to help Dipper and Mabel protect it while still protecting them?

Salt first. Purifying fire and questions later, if the kid decided to stick around for it. As long as he wasn't hurting her friends, she was willing to give him a shovel and see how deep he dug.

Danny didn't see the journal around, but Dipper apparently didn't need it to draw his magic circle thing in the dirt. To be fair, Danny didn't know if it was the same one as before, but he also didn't want to find out. Which meant taking the initiative and trying to explain before they decided to pull more magic stuff on him.

"Please don't do whatever you're planning on doing," he said, keeping his voice low in the hope that the guy he'd been talking to earlier wouldn't hear it. "I just want to talk, I swear."

"Are you ready to explain now?"

That was Dipper, with a bite in his voice that reminded Danny a bit of Valerie. Dipper might not sound even half as malicious as Valerie could when she was spitting curses at Phantom, but he was appropriately wary. "Yeah. But you have to promise you won't try any magic stuff."

"No. You're not defenseless, and I'm not swearing away my ability to protect anyone."

Oh. Right. He might think that particular promise carried more weight than a regular promise. He seemed to think giving his word would make it impossible to break. Danny didn't know of any ghosts with that power, and frankly he didn't want to meet one who had it. "You don't have to. I just…. I promise I'm not here to hurt you or anyone else. I only want to talk. And not, y'know, risk being exorcised if you don't believe me."

Mabel looked from Danny to her brother and raised an eyebrow. He scowled at her but said, "Fine. If you don't do anything except tell us the truth right now, I won't try to exorcise you."

Not ideal, but it wasn't like Danny was planning on lying through his teeth to them, anyway—or that he couldn't still attempt a lie if he felt he needed to. He had a feeling it wouldn't work, though. He hadn't had a whole lot of luck earlier. Maybe seeing through that thing was a kind of survival instinct around here, just like Secret Lab Guy had said.

Come to that, though— How had he had an entire conversation with someone, spilled half his life story to that someone, and not actually gotten their name?

Whatever. He'd ask later if he didn't figure it out before then. It just proved the point, though. These people were good. Sharper than he was used to, unless almost everyone in Amity Park had already figured out his secret and was just being nice and waiting for him to make some kind of grand announcement.

Yeah, right. If Amity Park's continued obliviousness wasn't natural, then Vlad had done something. Not something Danny would thank him for, exactly, but something he wouldn't fault him for, either.

"Thanks. Can I sit?" There weren't chairs. There weren't even logs. Dipper would be able to tell that he was staring at the circle drawn in the dirt, though, and know the question for what it was.

Mabel reached out one foot and drew a line through it with the toe of her shoe. "Yup!" she said, dropping down in place. "Pull up some grass."

Dipper glared at her as Danny sat down on a patch that was more gravel than grass, but the other boy didn't say anything; he just settled down and looked like he'd be ready to grab the axe beside him at a moment's notice. Danny didn't really want to find out if he knew how to use it. Then again, going by the assorted sizes of split logs nearby, he wasn't overly skilled; even if it wasn't a normal axe that Danny could avoid with intangibility, there was a good chance that Dipper was clumsy enough with it that he'd be easy enough to avoid.

"I'm sorry about not being entirely straight with you earlier when I said I would be." Danny didn't know where to begin, but an apology seemed smart when he still wanted their help.

"Which time, Phantom?"

Well, at least there wasn't any lingering doubt. Danny sucked in a breath and let it out slowly to give himself a bit of time to think. Mabel looked ready to listen, but Dipper…. He still wasn't sure about Dipper. "This isn't exactly something I tend to tell strangers," Danny said slowly, "but you're right. I'm Phantom. I'm the one you let out of the thermos."

Dipper was still practicing his glare, but Mabel asked, "So what are you? You're not a ghost. We've seen ghosts."

"I'm still a ghost," Danny said, since as far as he knew, that was true. "Just…part ghost. Part human." He rubbed the back of his neck and offered them a smile. "Remember when I joked about being the poster boy for interdimensional safety?"

"You expect us to believe you were in some sort of accident," Dipper said flatly.

They didn't need to know all the details, but— "Yeah. Lab accident. It didn't kill me, or at least I don't think it did, but I did get ghost powers, so that's cool. Not something I'd recommend to anyone, but cool."

Okay, Dipper definitely didn't believe that, but Mabel nodded as if Danny had said something normal and not what probably sounded insane. "Why were you in the thermos?"

"Clockwork, I think. He's the one who gave me the message to warn you in the first place, remember? Also the one who likes to pretend he doesn't interfere but interferes like this. I thought it was Vlad, until I…until I realized how long it had been. And, no, before you ask, I don't know who wrote that journal. I wasn't lying about that. The only important bit I lied about was 'Danny Fenton' being a friend."

"Why fess up now?" Dipper's question was a challenge, sure, but Danny could hear the genuine curiosity behind it. Chance were, he wasn't a great liar, either.

"Because I might need your help to get home. Especially if that help involves you trusting me enough to let me help you and you not trying to kill me first."

"What were you looking for earlier?" Danny blinked, trying to figure out what that meant, and Dipper must have read that confusion on his face because he elaborated, "Mabel heard you. We know you were back before you showed yourself now."

Right. She had been in the gift shop area, hadn't she? "I was trying to find some clue about what else I'm supposed to do here."

"And?"

That meant did you find it? Danny might've promised them the truth, but he'd also promised the other guy that he wouldn't blow that secret, either. More or less. Hopefully that wasn't what he was supposed to do here? "There's something weird about this place," he said instead. "It's got this…feeling. I don't know how to describe it." It was something unnerving, like the feeling the Fright Knight could give you, but with more…. More I'm-watching-you vibes. Vlad times a hundred. If he didn't need to stick around to get home, he'd be gone by now. Whatever Clockwork was trying to warn these guys away from, it felt like a danger on par with Pariah Dark.

Not that he'd be able to explain that to them.

Mabel reached over to poke Dipper in the arm. "Show him the journal."

That would make things a lot easier for him. "I could tell you what it has wrong about ghosts. Or at least about me," he offered. He wanted to do that regardless, but if he could give them more reason to show him, well….

"It seems to be right about you," Dipper said, "unless you want to pretend that you've never been affected by anything we've done."

Danny blew out a breath. "Look. Being part ghost doesn't mean I'm exempt from everything that works on ghosts. It also means that I need to be careful around hunters, including you guys. But I'm not here to fight you or steal something or whatever your book says about me. I'm the good guy, I swear."

"The good guy. Who needs his own little dedicated section in the journal."

"Dedicated section?" That sounded worrisome. How much info did these guys have on him? Some of it had to be accurate, but if it was just full of things he'd done as a ghost with no context, like the stealing—

"More like a paragraph," Mabel interrupted, "and it's not even in the same language as the rest of it."

Wait.

"Not the same language? What language is it?"

"See for yourself," Mabel said. She elbowed Dipper when he didn't immediately produce the journal and offer it up and then hissed a few things in his ear for good measure, which finally seemed to convince him. He pulled the journal out from beneath the vest he'd been wearing earlier, flipped through to the right page, and turned it around to show Danny.

Danny leaned closer, but he didn't recognize the language, either. If it was something ghosts spoke, he'd never seen it written down, but aside from Wulf, most of the ghosts he'd met spoke English. He didn't know how many other languages they spoke, though. He'd never asked. If this was some common language he had yet to learn….

"It might be the way it's coded," Dipper admitted, "instead of actually being in a different language. Some passages in the journal are coded, but they're all the same code, except for this. I haven't had any luck cracking it."

Danny frowned, reading the page over before Dipper could take it away. He couldn't see anything about a thermos or anything else that would have led them to him in the first place, but there was a bit of gibberish above that section written in green ink that might be the first code—

Wait. Green ink? Everything else in here was black or blue or some kind of brown that Danny really hoped wasn't blood. "What else is written in this colour?" he asked, pointing to the passage.

"That's it."

"In the entire book?" That didn't make sense. "But…why?"

"When I find the author of the journals," Dipper said bluntly, "that won't be one of the first questions I ask."

"It won't even be one of the first hundred," Mabel added. "Dipper's never understood the importance of colour."

To be fair, it wasn't typically high on Danny's list of priorities, either, but this colour thing was definitely strange. How many other weird things were in that book if this didn't make the list?

"Does it mean something to you?" Mabel asked.

Danny hesitated. The fact that it happened to be the same colour as his eyes—or his ectoplasm—in ghost mode could be a coincidence, but things tended to be a lot less coincidental when Clockwork was involved. Danny wasn't really ready to bet that whoever had written this journal had simply run out of every other colour of pen that day. "Maybe," he admitted, "but only in that it might point toward me." Or another ghost like him. Hopefully not Danielle.

"So do you know who wrote it?" she prompted.

He shook his head. "I don't know the handwriting. That's not saying much, though. There are a lot of people—and ghosts—I know whose handwriting I'd never recognize." He wasn't even sure he'd recognize the Ghost Writer's handwriting. "What does the other part say about me?"

"That something was stuck in a thermos behind the shack," Mabel answered immediately, ignoring her brother's glare. "Which it was."

"It's a Fenton Thermos, something specifically designed to contain ghosts. My parents build them." If he wasn't trying to keep his secret anymore, there was no harm in admitting that. "They're paranormal scientists and inventors."

"Like the author of the journal is," Mabel said, shooting Dipper a pointed look. "That must be why the bit about the thermos is in there."

"Not— I mean, I'm not thirty years old. Seriously. Do I look that old to you? I just turned fifteen last week." Well. Last week for him. Not for whenever this was, five years in his future. "Me being in the thermos is Clockwork's fault." Probably. Except Clockwork wouldn't have needed to catch him in a thermos to force him back here; he could've simply asked and called in a favour if Danny had complained, which he would've. More likely, Clockwork had merely taken advantage of someone else capturing him in a thermos, and that list of possibilities was long—and included more than one ally, even when the capturing was intentional.

"I don't know all the details, okay? I just…. I haven't met a ghost besides Clockwork that messes with time." His evil future self didn't count, not when Clockwork's power had still been the vehicle for everything he'd done.

…Danny really hoped this had nothing to do with him. Now that he thought about it, he didn't appreciate the thermos parallels.

Of course, now that he thought about it, the fact that he'd been stuck in a thermos had to be deliberate. Sure, it was a way to skirt the notice of the Observants, but Clockwork had messed with the timeline before without doing anything sneaky like that. If the thermos was important…. Coupled with the fact that there was a portal being built beneath a place called the Mystery Shack….

"That's why I'm here."

"You care to share with the class?" Dipper asked.

"The thermos, the portal—"

"What portal?"

Oops. "The, y'know, whatever, it doesn't matter, the point is, you said the author of the journals was a paranormal scientist? Maybe an inventor, too?"

"No, no, don't change the subject. What portal?"

"Like a portal to another dimension?" Mabel queried. "Is that why you talked about interdimensional safety earlier?"

Oh, crud. They weren't going to let his slip about the portal go. So much for that secret. "Just…never mind that right now. Paranormal scientist. Inventor. Like my parents. He probably didn't know them, it would've been too early on for them to have made a name for themselves, they might not even have been together yet, but…. Okay. This is gonna sound crazy—"

"Crazier than everything else you've said?" Dipper asked dryly.

"—but just go with me on this. Please. I know what happened when my parents messed stuff up, and—"

"And you're warning us so we're prepared and more careful," Mabel finished. "So I don't get impatient and Dipper doesn't get complacent."

Danny frowned. "What?"

"Your warning," she repeated. "You're not trying to get us to stop what we're doing. It's a terrible warning for that. That kind of thing just makes you wanna do it more, whatever it is. So you're actually warning us to be more careful than you think we would be otherwise."

Danny opened his mouth to tell her that warning someone not to do something obviously meant they shouldn't do it, and then he remembered all the times his parents had warned him not to touch stuff in the lab.

Right.

Maybe she wasn't wrong.

Just because that was what a warning meant, didn't mean it would always have the desired effect.

Moreover, Clockwork would know exactly what to have Danny say to get the desired effect.

He'd thought he'd come to help with the portal, but he still didn't know the blueprints of his parents' portal as well as Tucker did. If this were just about helping them build or fix the portal in the basement without bad consequences, Tucker was a better choice than he was, and Clockwork could most definitely have arranged that.

But Danny had joked about being the poster boy for interdimensional safety, and he could still disassemble and reassemble most of his parents' weapons in order to tweak them, even if he wasn't as good at it as Tucker, and he'd be an idiot to keep ignoring the fact that Clockwork had made sure he had a thermos here.

The thermos wasn't for him. It had never been for him. It had contained him, sure, but Clockwork must've made sure he was stuck in one so that he'd think of this. So that he'd think of what they'd done with his evil future self. And so he'd have it when he needed it.

There was a portal in a secret lab in the basement of the Mystery Shack, and the thermos written about in Dipper's journal was for whatever was coming out of it.