Well, school has been totally stressing me out and I had too much homework and not enough motivation to write, but I'm back with a new chapter that I wrote most of in class instead of doing work! Yay! I filled nearly a side and a half of a binder paper and used nearly a third of my tiny amount of remaining ink in my favorite pen. And that wasn't even the whole chapter.

This chapter is dedicated to the piece of binder paper and my nearly dead pen


Chapter 8: Secrets Within

The next morning was uneventful at first. Besides Yoltrun's disappearing act, the ghost puppy tearing up a pillow, and a plate slipping through Heather's hands and breaking, nothing was different... Until Alex showed up and Heather had the bright idea of showing him the secret room in her basement. Heather didn't hesitate to tell him about the room and take him down.

This time, Heather wasn't fearful on getting caught. She assumed, since she saw ghost hunting equipment, her dad had ghost detectors set up in the room, but since he already left for work, she felt confident she wouldn't be caught. She just assumed he had some secret entrance.

"Go ahead, check out the boxes," Heather said, after turning the lights on.

Alex nervously looked around the large yet mostly empty room, then checked the boxes. "This is like some twisted version of a kid's dream of finding treasure hidden in their house."

"You bet. If Dad or maybe even Mom hid this in here, there must be a secret door, like in the movies." Heather sent energy to her ghostly eyes and used them like flashlights to examine the walls of the dimly lit room.

Soon enough, Heather found some grout around a brick that glowed when she shined her eyes at it. Bingo, she thought. She pushed the brick the grout was surrounding, but nothing happened. Next, she tried phasing through the walls, but couldn't. After trying many times, she determined it wasn't malfunctioning powers.

She had one last idea. When she shined her eyes at the grout, it didn't reflect the light, it glowed. So, if it glowed with minor ecto-energy, it should do more, maybe open another secret room, with larger amounts, right?

Well, she was right. She forced a lot of energy to her hand (only making a really tiny ball) and placed it on the brick. The grout glowed bright green around the brick, and the rest of the grout on the wall glowed. The wall slid to the side and revealed a room blocked off by a transparent, glowing green barrier. There were computers, tables with old beakers filled with mysterious substances on them, shelves full of mysterious objects, and an unusual door on the back wall. Unfortunately, she couldn't go through the barrier, but Alex could.

Alex tried pulling her through, but the wall of light was more like a wall of glass for her. "Alex, stop! Maybe it's a ghost shield."

"Good thinking. Go human."

Heather went to her human form and walked into the shield. Sure enough, she went straight through.

"Now, lets check this stuff out," she said, "We never know what we might find."

Suddenly, a loud beeping sounded in the room. Heather grabbed the nearest laptop, ran out of the room, and grabbed Alex and flew away.


Sam was packing up to leave for work when a loud, distinct beeping came from the basement. She recognized it as the alarm to the secret lab. Only people with ghost powers can enter the lab... so why is the alarm going off?

She grabbed her phone and called Danny while going down to the basement. She pulled open the center brick on the side wall and typed in the password to the secret storage room. The bricks parted and opened the room. The air in there was cold. Not the usual basement cold, but freezing cold. She flicked on the light and removed the light switch cover, revealing another keypad. With a few presses of some buttons, Sam turned off the alarm and made the bricks above the switch part and reveal a touchscreen with the security system software.

Finally, Danny answered the phone. "Hey, what's up? You almost never call me when I'm driving."

"Lab alarm. Get home now."

There was a pause. "Ok. Let me park and I'll fly over there soon." He hung up.

Sam knew it would take him a few minutes, so she started going through the weapons to see if any of them had live ectoplasm or ghost energy to open the lab. Unfortunately, all the ectoplasm had dried into a dark-green, transparent, hard and flaky substance with no energy left and all the weapons with ghost-energy batteries had long since corroded. She decided to go back to the security screen.

The screen was dusty, but Sam wiped off the dust and checked the ghost energy detectors. There were readings of ghost energy, ranging small to average amounts. Motion detectors show two people entered the lab. The cameras had dust covering the lenses and busted microphones, so that was no help. She turned off the alarm closed the screen and waited for Danny, who came crashing down a few seconds later.

Without saying a word, he went to his human form and took a small ball of energy in his hand and put it against the magic brick and opened up the lab. "What's the security report?" He asked.

"Ghost energy detected. Two people recorded by the motion detectors. Cameras had too much dust on the lens and the microphones are busted."

With a sigh, Danny went through the shield and took a look around the lab, noticing something missing.

"Sam, the master laptop is gone."

Sam felt the fear rise. "You mean the one with everything we and the human race know about ghosts?"

He nodded. "We need to get it back quick."


Ugh. This chapter's dry and sorta boring. I hope you liked it. I am exhausted though, and its not so great of quality and you probably hate it but. oh well.