Three hours into the search, and Danny was just grateful that he had not met future Valerie yet. He had, after a great deal of deliberation, meandered into the area where he'd last seen her. It seemed to be the only place he hadn't checked, not that he'd actually been going into people's houses. Maybe he should have stayed with Kat, he thought. Although he didn't think he could have looked at her for another moment. It may have been thirty years for her, but Danny's anger was still perfectly fresh. The fact that she'd been so understanding had been strange, though…

Suddenly, his ghost sense went off, and he glanced around, instinctually hunting for the cause. He found her sitting on a flat portion of roof, cross-legged and strumming a guitar. "Gypsies…tramps, and thieves," she sang, swaying slightly in time to the music.

Danny decided to ignore her and would have continued on his way if a painful blast of green energy hadn't hit him from below. He cried out and slammed into the concrete, too alarmed to recover from his fall. Sitting up slightly, he wondered who could have seen him when he was invisible, and then he staring up the barrel of a plasma rifle into a disturbingly mismatched set of eyes. "Andrew, watch your aim!" yelled a painfully familiar voice that carried nothing of the familiar mockery.

"It's a ghost!" the cyborg yelled back.

The ghost girl dropped to the ground and fiddled with her mechanical bracelets. "Righteous, man!" she exclaimed. "It's Daddy's high school year book in living color!"

Sandruu stared down at Danny for a second, closed his eye as though in pain, and reached out to help the boy up. "Sorry," he said.

"Um…it's okay?"

Someone yelled, "Hey, Fenton! How many kids you got?"

A pause, then, "That's one's not mine! Andrew, get him inside."

"Are you sure?" Sandruu asked, turning to face his father.

Dan shook his head, gave his younger self a pitiable glance, and went over to converse with the neighbor. Danny made a token resistance, trying to stare. "Is that-"

"Hey, man," Lucy interrupted. "Nice threads. You come with me, okay? Sandy, you go talk to Val." Sandruu seemed to relax at the thought and jogged inside ahead of them. "I'm Lucy in the sky with diamonds, child of flowers and spring."

"Um…I'm Danny," he offered. It wasn't until after he said it that he realized she probably already knew. But she only smiled encouragingly and led him into the kitchen.

"Hey, you like the pad, man?" she said suddenly. "Daddy doesn't like my beau; he says we shouldn't be living together, but I say live and let live, man."

"It's okay…I guess…" He was feeling woefully out of his depth. She appeared to be searching for something in his expression, but she turned away to go hunting through the fridge. "So…was that your boyfriend?"

Lucy broke into her annoyingly high-pitched laughter. "Man, you're one funny cat. Sandy's my bro." Apparently having found what she was looking for, she returned to the table and set a soda in front of him.

He was slowly putting things together. The sudden burst of activity after so many hours of nothing had succeeded in confusing him, and the fact that everyone seemed to know what was going on except him had not helped. Between the neighbor's comment and the fact that he recognized his older self, he thought he had things just about figured out. "So how many kids do I have?"

His future daughter flashed an approving grin. "Seven."

"What?"

Lucy laughed. Behind her, Dan paused in the doorway and took a moment to roll his eyes. "What did she tell you?"

The voice was almost the same, but the looks were very different. Relaxing considerably, Danny crossed his arms to glare. "That you have seven kids."

His older self cringed at the mere thought. "Seven? No! Not if my life depended on it. Two is more than enough." The hippie only laughed harder.

Valerie leaned back to stare at the ceiling, arms folded behind her head. She'd spent the previous hour torn between trying to think and trying not to, and she was very confused. She liked Fenton, and she hated Phantom, and they were the same person. Not only were they the same person, but she'd been wrong. He wasn't an evil ghost. Some part of her mind tried to point out that he was probably just trying to fool her, but it had become painfully redundant. She just couldn't believe that anymore.

And yet, she still couldn't bring herself to think of Fenton and Phantom as the same person. She was grateful when a knock on the door brought her thoughts to a halt. "Come in," she called. The metallic twang had already told her who her visitor was.

Sandruu slipped in and closed the door behind him, earning a raised eyebrow. He smiled nervously. "Um, okay. Promise not to freak out."

"Why?" the girl demanded, suddenly suspicious.

"We have a guest." There was a prolonged pause, which Valerie finally broke with an impatient prompt. "He's…kind of a ghost…"

"Kind of a ghost?" Valerie repeated, folding her arms skeptically. She could hear Lucy's laughter through the door, faint voices…

Sandruu nodded, searching for the right way to word himself. He mentally cursed Lucy for sending him to talk to the angry ghost hunter; surely, she could have done a significantly better job. "He's a…sort of a ghost that you don't like much."

Valerie was on her feet as if by magic. Suddenly, she knew exactly who their guest was. Would the cyborg have been dancing around the subject if it had been, say, Skulker? Probably not. "Who is it?" she asked anyway. The venom in her voice could have killed a ghost.

"Now, calm down!" Sandruu exclaimed, his eye shifting to an alarmed green. "I won't let you hurt him!"

"What makes you think you can stop me?" Her suit formed around her, and suddenly he was staring up at a spinning world through his human eye; the mechanical one had shut down. There was a painful ringing in his head, and when he tried to stand, he found that the only limb he could move was the flesh one.

"Val," he choked out, trying to pull himself along while his machine half slowly kicked back in. "Wait!"

Valerie clutched her stolen plasma rifle, grateful that she wouldn't have to try aiming her energy cubes. She wasn't entirely certain she could properly visualize actually hitting him. She charged into the kitchen, noted and promptly ignored Dan and Lucy's presence, and leapt onto the table almost without bothering to think about it. Danny…Phantom…whoever he was, she thought, intangibly fell backwards in an effort to escape. The ghost hunter kicked the chair out of the way as she dropped next to it, shoving the barrel of her rifle against his chest.

Suddenly, it was as though time slammed to a halt. Danny, still in ghost form, cringed beneath her, looking far too much like his human self for comfort. His eyes were closed tightly, expecting the worst. He could have become intangible; she wouldn't have been able to follow. So why did he just kneel there? After a moment, a thin line of glowing light appeared between his eyelids. She almost laughed at the realization that he had opened his eyes just the barest crack to see why he wasn't dead yet, just like any scared little boy might.

"You are human…" she whispered. The weapon dropped from her nerveless fingers; unconsciously dismissing her equipment, she turned and walked past the family gathered in the doorway to drop into a chair in the living room. She heard some low muttering behind her as Sandruu, who had finally arrived, tried to figure out what was going on. A mocking comment by Lucy followed by an admonishment from their father. Danny's voice…

And it was Danny's voice. The ghostly echo never really masked it, but it had never really hit her before. "Valer-" he began.

"Don't talk to me," she interrupted.

More muttering. "No, she's being stupid!" Sandruu exclaimed.

"Andrew, enough!" Dan's voice. More muttering and the sound of metal hitting carpet considerably harder than was necessary. The older half ghost sighed. "I'll go after him. Lucy?"

"No worries, old man," the on-again-off-again hippie replied. "It's all cool. Come on, little one. Let's jam on up to the roof. We've got a totally boss view."

Then Valerie was alone again, and she wasn't sure she wanted to be. She glanced down at her ghost alarm. Lucy had kept activating it whenever she turned off her bracelets, so the young ghost hunter had simply shut it off.

She was trying not to think. She wanted to like Danny. She truly wanted to.

So why was it so hard?

After what seemed like an eternity, she stood and ventured outside. She had assumed that Lucy reached the roof by flying, but there was a staircase along the side of the house. She climbed up to the top few steps and stopped to listen.

"I know I shouldn't have lied to her," Danny was saying. "But she thought I was trying to kill her! And Technus didn't help any that one time. What was I supposed to do?"

"Truth is always the answer," was Lucy's vague, music-accompanied reply. "Lies were invented by the Man to keep us down, man. If you're lying, then you're playing right into their conspiracy."

There was a pause. "Are you sure you're supposed to be my kid?"

Valerie covered her mouth to stifle her snickering. She'd been wondering the same thing since they met. Apparently she wasn't quiet enough because after several moments, Lucy called, "Come join the ball, man! We're totally talking about you!"

She considered slipping back to ground level, but that would have been the cowardly thing to do. Danny was back in human form again, she noticed. Probably for the best. He sat hunched over and facing away, the very picture of dejection and misery. After some deliberation, Valerie chose a lawn chair on Lucy's other side, where she couldn't see him as easily. "Where'd you get your taste in music, anyway?" she asked.

Lucy merely laughed and shook her head, but Danny piped up, "From Gypsy." He turned slightly to see the two women regard him, one in amusement and the other in hostile suspicion. Sighing sadly, he turned his gaze back to his feet. At least she wasn't trying to kill him.

"So what are those bracelets for?" Valerie asked for lack of anything better to say.

The woman chuckled lightly and shook her head again; Valerie briefly wondered if that was her answer to everything. "I am totally not there without them," she answered brightly. "Completely intangible." She pretended to ignore the near-identical looks of alarmed skepticism on the teens' faces.

"Are you…serious?" Danny asked tentatively. He tried for a moment to envision what that would be like. It had been bad enough when his powers were out of control, but to not even have the chance at control? He shuddered. "Sounds horrible."

"Nah. It's a bummer when they cut out on me, but it made finding sitters a total drag for Daddy." She stopped playing long enough to laugh and add, "And that's why he finally got Gyp to drop over when he was out. She was the only one who could tolerate us both."

There was an expectant kind of silence then, punctuated by the quiet sound of their hostess singing "Dream a Little Dream." She seemed to have a knack for choosing the song Valerie least wanted to hear at any given moment. In an effort to make her quiet again, the girl leaned over to see Danny better and asked suspiciously, "How'd you know?"

It took him a second to realize that she had actually addressed him, and he was clearly fighting off delight at the prospect. "Gypsy likes that music," he said quickly, a bit too eager to answer. "She died in the seventies, and she told me the only thing she remembered of being alive was the music."

Valerie leaned back again, and Danny seemed to just wilt. She could have kicked herself, then she remembered that she was supposed to hate ghosts. It didn't seem to help. "I thought she was older than that," she said quietly.

After a moment, Lucy stood and stretched. "I think I heard Sandy," she mentioned idly. "Don't have too much fun without me."

Danny turned all the way around to stare after her in growing panic, then let his eyes trail over Valerie, who simply looked away. He relaxed marginally; at least, she wasn't trying to kill him. There was a light fog on the ground, he noticed while desperately searching for distraction. It seemed out of place considering the cloudless sky. He glanced at Valerie again, who looked away again. He stared at his feet.

"How'd it happen?"

He jumped, then blushed. "Um…lab accident." Silence. "In the basement," he added helpfully. More silence. "Weird weather…"

Valerie couldn't help herself; she smiled ever so slightly. "Must be a future thing."

Yet more silence, suddenly broken by the faint sound of a jet sled. The two teens looked around until they saw Valerie's future self, still relatively far away. "I'm…going to go see how Lucy's doing…" Danny informed the ghost hunter moments before dropping through the roof. That would take some getting used to.