Hello, people!
Okay, a mite late on the update, but I have a legitimate reason! I forgot about Advent service on Wednesday nights. But that's life for ya, isn't it?
Um, and I know I didn't reply to reviews. Heh, it just kept slipping my mind. I'll remember this time around. And I'll reply to them as soon as I get them, so there won't be any problems! Right? Right? Right.
Anyway, here we have chapter ten, all sparkly and shiny for you to read.
Disclaimer: Gets the teensiest bit boring after a while, but I don't own DP. Yawnity sigh.
Chapter 10: Finding and Found
"What took you so long?" Danny asked of the tired-looking Vlad who had just trudged through the door to the Fenton Works laboratory.
"Well, I had to wait for my driver to show up. The idiot couldn't think of a better excuse than bad traffic," Vlad protested with annoyance.
"And the reason you couldn't just take a taxi was...?" Tucker prompted.
"I, Vlad Masters, ride in one of those filthy excuses for a car?" Vlad scoffed. "I don't think so."
Danny rolled his eyes at his archenemy. If only Vlad could have collapsed, and right in front of his parents as well...
"So, Danny? What do you think we should do about this whole cure fiasco?" Sam pulled him back to reality. Danny shook his head and blinked.
"You know, I really have no idea."
"Well, I think we still might be able to find a cure," Jazz insisted confidently. "It's just a matter of analyzing this disease and isolating the virus, then we just need to figure out what will make it harmless. Which would be difficult, given that ghosts don't have an immune system, as I said before."
"Difficult how, exactly?" Danny asked.
"Well, it would make things simpler if we could find a way to combine the key elements of a human's immune system with a ghost's energy. But for that we'd need to have a combination of ectoplasm with a human's blood, and we can't exactly get that..." she trailed off.
"Oh, great. Where do I sign up?" Danny asked resignedly with a heavy sigh.
"Danny, we'd need someone who already has that characteristic, and you don't exactly fit that bill," she explained.
"But Danny Phantom can?" Danny said. Jazz bit her lip as she realized what she had overlooked.
"Danny Phantom can," she confirmed.
Vlad looked at either of them. He hadn't been overly fond of any sort of medical procedures, given his past, and decided that he should edge out of the room before they involved him in this.
"Well, then, I've done my part, so I'll just be going..." he said, backing away towards the stairs.
"Oh no," Danny intervened. "You're not going to weasel your way out of this, Plasmius. If I have to do this, you have to do this, too."
"Why, Daniel, may I remind you that you are in no position to be telling me what to do. You cannot force me to do this, you know."
"Actually, the scary part is, I probably could," Danny retorted. "But you're in this no matter what."
Jazz nodded her agreement of her brother.
"That's right, Mr. Masters. Cures for diseases must be tested by a sizeable group, as well as a control group, to check that everyone reacts the same way. You're the only other person who can do that."
Vlad opened his mouth to argue, then shut it as he met Danny's green glare. He'd never known the boy to make empty threats, and although he knew that he could beat Danny easily, he had reason as of late to be suspicious of him. There was something he wasn't telling Vlad, and that something would probably best be not discovered by personal experience. It seems almost a shame that Vlad didn't know how right he was.
"Fine then. I'll do it," he relented.
"Okay then. I think now would be a good time for me to leave..." Tucker said.
"If I couldn't, what makes you think you can?" Vlad asked sharply.
"Trust me, you don't want to go there," Sam said. "Come on, Tucker, let's get you out of here before you go ballistic on us..."
"Right," he said. "Think 'Modeling Agency'."
Danny glanced up at his sister and arch-nemesis staring at him with blank looks that seemed to say 'What was that all about?' He shook his head.
"Sam's right. You really do not want to go there."
Clockwork sighed and turned towards the Observants, who had just appeared behind him. They were not, as would have been, in Clockwork's timeful abode. Instead, they were elsewhere in the Ghost Zone; a tall gray door, with an arched top etched with green symbols cast its shadow over them.
"We delivered your message as you had requested," the first Observant said.
"And the book as well," added the other.
"Good, good..." Clockwork said as his form shifted from that of a young child to a man. "I never thought I'd live to see the day when either of you would take action in anything."
"But you are a ghost!" the first exclaimed.
"It's a figure of speech," Clockwork remarked dryly. "Now then, I expect you'll go back to your oh-so-wonderful oath of watching?"
"Of course," the other Observant replied.
"That was a rhetorical question," he said, shaking his head slightly.
"And are you finally acting as we had instructed?" the first Observant posed again the question he had been asking of the ghost for quite some time.
"I am, and have been," Clockwork stated with an impatient air. "Now if you would leave me in peace...?"
The Observants looked at one another and nodded. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.
Clockwork closed his eyes and sighed, as he shifted to an elderly form. Opening them again, he looked up towards the door. Or, more specifically, the symbols glowing faintly upon the archway.
"Perhaps Danny will accomplish what we could not," he said to the characters. "But for now I must find our old foe so we can put a stop to this."
And Clockwork was gone.
"Jazz, are you finished yet?" Danny asked in a bored voice. He was lying on his back upon one of the tables in his parents' lab. Danny was crumpling pieces of paper up, throwing them into the air, and shooting them with ectoblasts. Vlad, who was leaning against one wall with arms folded across his chest, was watching this procedure with mild interest.
"Rome wasn't built in a day, you know," she retorted with the cliche phrase, looking up from the microscope she was bent over.
"Yeah, but if you were in charge of building operations, it would have," Danny said, sitting up. Jazz turned back to the microscope, but he could have sworn she was smiling.
Danny picked up a long purple feather and looked it over. He presumed it had belonged to the griffin he had fought so long ago. On a whim, Danny picked up a piece of paper that had yet to be crumpled, and scratched upon it, using the feather like a quill. The slightest bit of concentration, and it wrote with green ink. Danny glanced over towards Vlad, and began drawing a picture of him in bunny slippers. But it was a very rough picture, as Danny coughed every once in a while.
Tucker and Sam had gone home; Tucker on the excuse that his gerbil, who had died seven years previously, needed to be walked, and Sam because her parents still weren't over fond of any of the Fentons-excluding, perhaps, Jazz. Danny's parents had called to say that they were staking out a ghost in an abandoned warehouse somewhere on the far side of town, and wouldn't be back until, as his father had put it, "These Ghost Gauntlets grabbed some ghost!"
And so, they were alone in the house. The laboratory was silent, save for Jazz's occasional muttering, Danny's scratching quill, Vlad's slight whistling, and the occasional cough from either he or Danny.
"Aha!" Jazz said triumphantly, nearly forty-five minutes after Danny had began drawing. Taken by surprise he and Vlad both jumped.
"Well? Did you find something?" Vlad asked anxiously. Jazz nodded, with a smile upon her face.
"I think so," she said, looking at a beaker containing a green substance, not unlike the ectoplasmic residue that often littered the lab.
"And does it work?" he prompted her.
"Well, we'll just have to find out, won't we?" she said. She measured two amounts of the substance into small vials.
"We- we don't have to drink that, do we, Jazz?" Danny asked, with a revolted look upon his face. Jazz smiled cheerfully at him, and Danny groaned.
"It's sort of like a vaccination, but unfortunately, I couldn't find any type of syringe, so yes, you'll have to drink it," Jazz explained. "Hopefully, it'll make you better."
"Yeah, and side effects include headache, nausea, loss of appetite..." Danny said. But he accepted the vial from Jazz, as did Vlad.
"Cheers," Danny said to Vlad, and with a last disgusted look, drank the contents of the vial at the same time as his archenemy.
"Ugh, it tastes like a combination of cardboard, aluminum foil, and lime Jell-O," Vlad said, making a face.
"Really? I thought it was better than most of the other stuff Jazz's cooked up... OW!" Danny said, as Jazz hit him lightly on the head with the book he had translated. "Um, you are sure this won't kill us, right, Jazz?" he asked.
"If I'm right, it shouldn't," she reassured him.
"Never before have I been more grateful that you are always right," Danny muttered. Raising his voice slightly, he added, "And now I'm going to drink something to wash this disgusting taste out of my mouth."
Danny hurried up the stairs, leaving Jazz with an expression somewhere between bashfulness, annoyance, and modest pride.
Vlad looked over at the picture Danny had been drawing; he was curious as to what it was.
"DANIEL!" he shouted angrily as he caught sight of his own image.
Wearing a fluffy, pink bunny costume.
With very oversized floppy ears.
And a mustache.
And… tah-dah! Just couldn't resist that last little bit. You should all know me that well by now. And the only reason it wasn't evil Danny was because I was being realistic; why would someone want to draw a picture of something that reminds them of a painful memory? Wah. Still need to find something to do with those bunny-suited evil Danny pics I have…
Okay, this was kind of short compared to some of my other chapters, and didn't seem to flow as well. To be honest, not much of interest or relevance to the story happened here, excepting the cure being found and the part with Clockwork. But the good news upon this is I've the foundations for the rest of the story laid, and although I am unsure exactly how many more chapters this'll have, I have the ending all planned out. Bank on, (hopefully) at most, three more, plus the epilogue. Although, being me, I'll probably try to do it in two and the epilogue, because I am absolutely dying to start my next story.
And the cure… I was really rushing this. In real life, it would take much longer to find this, but I'm too lazy to go through that whole long process. Use your imagination there, okay? And I've actually had medicine like that before. Chalk, bubble gum, and eraser shavings. Or, aluminum foil, cherry, and maple syrup. Neither is a pleasant combination. Bleh.
Well, on an unrelated note, I might as well say that I'm on the verge of strangling a certain Tammy Thamster… I know where I'm going with that story, I just can't get from point A to point B without banging my head on the keyboard, getting bored of HF, and writing the first two and a half chapters of 'The Halfa That Time Forgot' and the prologue for another story that is absolutely killing me… Geeze, I'm never going to get these ideas finished!
Anyway, I have no idea when the next update will be! Setting goals doesn't exactly work for me, as my little experiment this week proved. Ah, such is the life of a procrastinator. But I've got a lot of motivation to finish this, with the light at the end of the tunnel sighted and the first few paragraphs of the next chapter written. I'll have to rant about 'The Fright Before Christmas' some other time. All I have to say for now is… Darn it! Can't I watch just one episode, one episode, of DP without getting fifty gazillion ideas to veto? Heh, I'm going to put every single one of those ideas on my profile. Oh, yes. Yes, I will. And then you will see the enormous amount of self-discipline I am consuming by trying to not write these. Maybe the world really will end in 2012, because that's how long it'll take for me to finish these. Yeah, I can just picture that happening…
Ugh, rambling! Ramble, ramble, ramble… Can't I do anything else? Yeah, I can. I can type my self-appointed initials right below here, and then go and write the next chapter.
-E.P. (Heh, see? Told ya I could…)