Another short one, but the second half is intense! I think. At least, it has a lot of information and foreshadowing in it. Maybe I should just say that it's information dense, which kind of sounds like intense? I'm going to stop now.

There are some terms and names in this chapter that you may not be familiar with. I'm going to explain them at the end of the chapter if you're interested.

MsFrizzle: You are right. I have some regrets about character placement... But I had already committed myself with previous chapters, and Danny's class is really nosy... I don't know. I'll just have to juggle them better in the future, I guess. As for the second shadow and the organizational problems, the issue is that the lair doesn't know what's in the books. Danny hasn't read them, and the lair hasn't been able to. Thank you for the criticisms! This is just what my writing needs. :)

Jadejem1: Thank you for catching that typo!

jwagne51: I didn't mean to attack your comment or anything like that, just agreeing with you that they weren't monsters. Sorry.

Thank you all for continuing to read this!

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Chapter 36: Katabasis

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"Danny," said Maddie.

"Hm?"

"Danny, don't you think that we should take a break?"

Danny stopped and looked back. They had only been walking for an hour or so. Maybe an hour and a half. For the past twenty or so minutes, there hadn't even been any stairs, and the wisps had been avoiding the more vertigo-inducing 'impossible' areas. They were in a wide, Grecian-styled corridor, that had a row of round fountains down the center. Many of the fountains, to Danny's amusement, contained a thin layer of coins on their bottoms.

Really, the more he saw of his lair, the more pleased he was by it. Beyond simple aesthetic appeal and comfort, it was so labyrinthine and unsettling that a would-be invader might be defeated by architecture alone.

"I guess a break would be okay," said Danny, once he realized that he had been staring blankly at his mother for the past several seconds. He sat down heavily on the edge of a fountain, enjoying the cool spray.

Leader whistled up at him. Danny looked down, and hummed inquisitively. Leader sang back.

"He says we're about halfway there."

"To the door?" asked Rebecca excitedly.

"No. To the next, um. Nice place to rest." He hummed a quick question, and Leader responded in kind. "They aren't entirely sure how far it is to the door. They don't go there very often, and-" Danny frowned. Had he heard that correctly? "And there's actually another clan living in that area?"

"What?"

"A different family group of wisps. They're from the same tribe, though, it sounds like..." Danny trailed off. "It doesn't really matter." He freed a hand to rub the back of his neck. "Actually probably be better, they'll know the area better..." He trailed off, gazing up at the painted ceiling. Were those frescoes? They were nice.

"Hey, Danny," said Jazz. "Are you feeling okay? You're all flushed."

"I'm fine," mumbled Danny, holding more tightly to Leader.

Sam sat down next to him. "You use that line so often that I'm almost certain that you don't know what it means." She put her hand on his forehead, and frowned. "You're a little warm," she said.

"Is he?" asked Maddie. She put her own hand on Danny's head, he flinched back, but stilled himself. "Hm. I think that you might actually be a bit cool."

Ah. That wasn't good. He should definitely be cool. In both senses of the word. He probably did have a fever, compared to his normal temperature, which was just short of hypothermic.

Maybe he'd take a cold shower. Or a cold bath.

"See? I told you I was fine."

"Before you were telling me that not expecting side effects from being possessed-"

"Overshadowed."

"-was delusional. Tell the truth, Danny."

Danny's eyes darted from Maddie, to Sam, to Jazz. He looked at Tucker who was examining his PDA as if he had never seen it before. No help there.

Sam and Jazz could have at least waited until they had a private moment. Really. He couldn't say, 'Oh, just, y'know, my core acting up, no longer really working with my body's homostasis, and I'm worried that the ectoplasmic constructs in my body might be breaking down or damaged. But, I mean, that's to be expected, what with everything that's been done to it recently.' That somehow managed to sound crazy even when he knew what was going on.

"I- I guess I'm kinda sore," he said. He ignored a snide remark from Dash. "Tired, too. But everyone is, right? Um. A little dizzy, I suppose. Like when you stand up too fast."

"You mean low blood pressure?" asked Maddie.

"Yeah. Sure."

"Is that what happened when Echo," she said the name with extreme reluctance, "grabbed you?"

Time for some creative lying! Yay! Not. He decided that he wasn't talking to either Sam or Jazz for putting him in this position. Then, he immediately decided that was too mean, and that he should be passive aggressive instead. But he wasn't very good at that. He always forgot what he was doing. Maybe he should just be mad at them.

He still needed a lie.

"Not really. It was more like, I couldn't move?" Argh, don't say it like it's a question! "I think that it might have been Phantom trying to wake up, but he couldn't." Get the hint, Jazz, Sam.

"Really?" asked Maddie, clearly getting sidetracked by scientific curiosity. "Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know," said Danny. "But if that's what it was, I'm kinda hoping that he doesn't do it again until we can fix this."

Maddie frowned, clearly concerned. "You kids were telling the truth about there being things at home that can fix this?"

"Yeah. But depending on where we come out of here," Danny indicated the lair, "there may be some ghosts that can help nearby, or on our way or whatever. Really, Mom. I'd prefer this not to last any longer than it has to, and I'm pretty sure that you feel the same way. If we're lucky, they can help us get back home, too, so there's that."

Maddie nodded once, unhappily.

"I think we should keep going," said Danny, standing back up.

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Operation Katabasis had been approved.

FentonWorks was surrounded by white tape, white tents, and quarantine equipment. The two houses to either side of FentonWorks had been similarly commandeered, as had the backyard and across the street neighbors. Field agents and scientists had been pouring into the buildings for hours, as had weapons, tools, rations, body armor and vehicles. The Specter Speeder had been considered, but it wasn't regulation. It, most of the Fenton inventions, and all available Fenton blueprints had been shipped to GIW headquarters.

There would be three groups in the expedition.

The one which would carry out Operation Katabasis' official, publicly avowed, mission would be called Team Orpheus. Their job was escorting the students and their teacher back home. These men would proudly wear the GIW uniform whites.

The second team, which had the putative duty of scouting and providing an extra screen for Team Orpheus and their charges, was called Team Eurydice. These men would wear camouflage, and carried powerful weapons which could injure, incapacitate, and even kill humans. The true task of these men was to prevent the Fentons from returning to Earth.

The third team was to be called Team Inanna. Officially, it was to be a small exploratory force, available to be detached in case the students had been separated from one another. Nothing special. The only interesting thing about it had been the argument about its name. One of the GIW brass had delusions of Greek-ness, and had insisted on a Greek name, as with the other two teams, but he had been overruled by a higher-ranked individual who wanted to follow the theme of katabasis.

Unofficially...

These were the best GIW agents available. The cream of the crop. They hated ghosts, despised them with every fiber of their beings. Many of them had lost family members and loved ones to possessions and hauntings. They were willing, more than willing, to give up their lives to finally destroy the undead menace that was the Ghost Zone.

The weapon they carried with them had been made from the tortured, starved remnants of a level nine ghost, blood-blossoms, ectoranium gathered from a meteorite that had struck somewhere in Russia decades before, space-age materials, and the ingenuity of generations of GIW scientists and engineers. It was called Project Ophiotaurus in paperwork, but the good men and women of Team Inanna called it the Bomb.

It was a weapon suitable for shaking loose the foundations of reality. It was a weapon that could kill gods. A weapon that could defeat Death himself if he dared show his face. Team Inanna would feel confident storming heaven with such a weapon in their hands.

It was more than sufficient to destroy hell.

Operation Katabasis was a go.

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'Katabasis' is an Ancient Greek term meaning 'to go down.' It can be used to mean a trip to the coast, a journey going downhill, or for depression, etc, but in literature it is most often used to refer to a trip to the underworld.

Orpheus and Eurydice were figures from Greek myth. Orpheus and Eurydice fell in love and got married, but Eurydice died, and Orpheus went to Hades to get her back. Hades was charmed by Orpheus' musical skills, so he said yes, on the condition that he not look at Eurydice until they were both back in the upper world. You can guess how that ended.

Inanna (or Ishtar) is a Mesopotamian goddess who went down to the underworld mostly to screw with her older sister Ereshkigal (also called Irkalla, or Ninkigal), the Queen of the Underworld. It didn't go super well for Inanna, but the other gods bailed her out, and then her husband took the fall for her.

The Ophiotaurus is a mythical Greek monster, the entrails of which are supposed to give the one who burns them the power to overthrow the gods. I think it might have shown up in Percy Jackson, but it's been an age since I read those books.