"Ah, no. I'm not Danny! I was just with him!" said Danny. Tucker watched as Not Danny's form contorted and shifted until it was a gray-skinned ghost in a trenchcoat. "I am Amoprho!"
Valerie frowned. "What did you do to Danny?" she demanded. Amorpho looked confused, but then Valerie leveled her gun at him.
"I didn't do anything to him! Why would I?"
"You're a ghost!"
Amorpho looked more baffled now than scared. "So is-"
"Amorpho! Val!" Tucker intervened, waving his hands between them. "Let's get along. Amorpho is a good guy! He says he's here to help us."
"I don't trust him."
"But I can help you defeat Skulker."
. * . * .
Jazz opened her eyes. She coughed. She rubbed her eyes. She stretched. She sat up.
She did not recognize her surroundings.
She did not remember going to sleep. She did not know why her hand felt like it was recently lit on fire.
The last thing she remembered was… Something about a cat.
. * . * .
"The number of captives you have is over the limit!" proclaimed Walker.
"What's the limit, officer?" asked Nocturn.
"Zero! Do you have a permit?"
"Should I?"
"Only I, Warden of the Ghost Zone, has and is able to give out the proper licensure," Warden Walker said, eying the number of humans lining the room. "I don't recall giving you one."
"Is that so?" grinned Nocturn, snapping his fingers. From the shadows appeared his Sleepwalkers.
The Warden just chuckled. He barked an order and his own Officers came forward.
. * . * .
Wes was freaking out. Jazz was not in the Doorless Room. There was no trace she had ever been in the Room, but for the pile she had made with the books, and the candles she had used to see.
He snatched up The Curse of St- and snapped it open, landing in Faust.
. * . * .
Walker's goons and Nocturn's walkers clashed. Green blobs met bucket heads.
. * . * .
Wes approached the first person he saw, which happened to be someone he knew.
"Gabriel!" he called.
"Wes, Faust's Fire Man!" Gabriel cheered.
"Have you seen Byrnhilda?"
"No, not since this morning. She left the bar, talkin' 'bout Tyr and Odin."
"What are those?"
. * . * .
Walker punched Nocturn right in the face, who staggered back.
. * . * .
Gabriel said words which Wes did not understand. It sounded like "Gibbersnop gorfinwa drtixlys fuu," but that couldn't be right.
"What?" Wes asked.
. * . * .
Jazz shook the people around her, trying with all her might to wake them.
. * . * .
Nocturn conjured green flames from his ecto energy and flung it at his adversary.
Walker struck it with his own pink ectoblast. Nocturn vanished when the pink energy continued its course from Walker's hands. He appeared behind Walker and smacked him aside, for the first time seeing that a human was awake.
"You!" he bellowed. "Stop this at once! Rise!"
. * . * .
Gabriel's face slackened. He froze in place.
"Gabriel?" Wes said, moving his hand back-and-forth in front of his face. "What's wrong with you?"
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone else. It was the bartender. She stood in place, mid-step, frozen.
. * . * .
The unconscious bodies rose slowly as Jazz shook them and yelled. For a moment she thought they had awoken. But this was not the case.
They stood with eyes closed, arms reaching for her. They shuffled forward and Jazz was dismayed to recognize a number of them. Wes, the basketball player from school; Kwan, the footballer; Madam Babazita, from the marketplace.
But most horrendously alarming was a pair of adults in the ridiculously embarrassing spandex.
Her parents stumbled toward her and her heart sank. She couldn't take on her parents, much less all of them and Nocturn and his Sleepwalkers and Walker and his goons!
. * . * .
Hopelessly lost, Danny sighed in frustration.