ZinFinz: Sorry for confusing you! I realize in retrospect that last chapter is not 100 percent clear on who is who. Danny is Dani. Ellie is Neil. I hope you're enjoying this story otherwise!

Thank you all for reading!

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Chapter 116:

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Clockwork stood in his laboratory, his equipment focused on one, particular paradox. Fixing paradoxes was what Issitoq was letting him do, so he was going to do it. He was going to do it in the most flamboyant and fanciful way possible, and he was going to do it in front of people who knew who he was and where he lived.

Hopefully, before the day was up, his sister would show up to throw a shoe at him and tell him to knock it off.

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The twenty-fourth floor of the Digressed Tower was a maze of rooms and hallways. Add panic, confusion, a Scooby-Doo-esque chase scene, and the disastrous inclusion of way too much cheese, and everyone had gotten separated and scattered. Whose idea was the cheese, anyway? Everyone knew how cheese affected people, especially humans!

Then, there was cheese, even more cheese, secreted all throughout this ridiculous maze. Who would do something like this?

Psychologists. Psychologists would do something like this.

Danny shifted from foot to foot and glared at the ghosts in the room, who were reclined on brocade silk lounges, indulging in the stuff. He couldn't understand people, sometimes. He'd tried cheese once. It wasn't that good, for all its attractive properties.

What he was really annoyed about, though, was that none of the ghosts could help them with directions. Danny and Ellie had been hoping that someone here could help them find the people they'd been separated from, but the ghosts here didn't even know where the exits to this floor were. They had laughed when Ellie had asked the question.

"Back or forward?" she asked, this time turning to Danny.

Danny licked his lips. "I don't know." He turned around, trying to get a sense of where they had come from, of where they had been. They had passed through a dozen doors to get here, leaving some of the rooms in shambles as they fought off various, oddly incompetent, bounty hunters.

It was really weird, actually. He had a sinking suspicion that the more dangerous bounty hunters were hanging back, waiting for a chance to strike. Or maybe just for the other thugs to drive out all the other ghosts hanging out in the Tower with their blatant truce violations.

"This way, I think," said Danny, pointing.

"That's a wall."

"Forget walls. We can beat walls to heck. We can walk through them."

Ellie blinked. "These walls?"

Danny stuck an arm through the wall. "Looks like it."

"I somehow forgot that we could do that here. Hey, do you think-?" She floated up to the ceiling and tapped on it. "I guess not."

"Can we hurry up?" asked Danny, once again dancing from foot to foot. His heart was hammering. "They're going to get killed. They're going to-" He inhaled deeply, and held his breath while counting to five. Having a panic attack would not be productive. Honestly, having a panic attack was never productive. They sucked. The cheese wasn't helping.

Ellie was back beside him. "I'm going first," she said.

"Fine," said Danny. Ellie, being healthy, would be faster to react to unexpected enemies on the other side of the wall. All the same, he would be ready to pull her back at the first indication of trouble, ready to shield her from any attackers who might mistake her for him. They did look almost identical, after all, even without the added confusion of the Tower. Someone might think that this was the gender swap floor, and well, thinking about that one floor down, he knew that if he and Ellie switched genders, they would look exactly like one another.

He followed Ellie through the wall. They were in an empty room without any doors.

"This wasn't what I expected," said Danny.

"Yeah," said Ellie. "So, should we keep going?"

"Yeah. I think, um. I'm pretty sure Amity is this way," he said, pointing. His 'homing sense' wasn't working perfectly right now, but it was working. "It was that way when we came up, and considering how we turned, I'm pretty sure that if we keep going this way, we'll wind up crossing our path... Or getting behind the stairs. I don't know how far into the center of the room the stairs let out... But that should help us pick up where everyone else went."

"Yeah, I can see that," said Ellie. "If they left a trail."

"Twenty teenagers? Trust me, they left a trail. Maybe Vlad didn't, but he can take care of himself. Usually."

"Yeah. He knows how to run when the going gets tough. I'm surprised that he hasn't already."

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Usually, Vlad would have already cut his losses and run. He was powerful, but many of the ghosts he had seen coming for Daniel were almost as powerful, and there were a great many more of them. Vlad hadn't survived as long as he had by picking his battles poorly. Pariah Dark and Vortex had been flukes.

(At least, he hoped so.)

But if he left, Daniel, and probably Danielle, would be killed. Then he would be alone. More alone. Again. Even if both Daniel and Danielle hated him, they were at least company. They, and no one else, knew what it was like to be human-ghost hybrids. He couldn't do that. He couldn't be alone again. He couldn't bear it. The very thought left his mouth dry and his hands shaking, which was decidedly inconvenient in a fight like this one.

Of course, he wasn't quite prepared to die. No. He had never been prepared to die. He had never gotten over the scare he had gotten in the hospital twenty years ago.

But he would put up a fight. He would defend Daniel and Danielle. He wouldn't just let them be murdered. And perhaps- Perhaps they would be grateful. Yes. They would be grateful, and let him into their lives, offer him friendship. After all, wasn't that how it so often happened in cartoons, or whatever nonsense children were into nowadays?

(Peanut brittle, but his sounded old.)

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William Lancer, meanwhile, was lamenting the fact that on the lower floor, when he had been a woman, he had also been a) in shape, b) a teacher, and c) not a cheese addict. He had no idea how b had come about, but he was willing to bet that it was related to the other two. He also didn't understand how it was possible that all of these random children still seemed to think that he was their teacher.

It couldn't possibly be the case that him being a teacher was likely throughout the multiverse? No. No way. He was an unhealthy, drug-addicted, depressed semi-successful author. Not a teacher. Children gave him a headache. He wouldn't have even been at the school except that the English teacher (who had managed to disappear without anyone noticing the second they stepped into this 'Tower') had wanted him to give a speech on his most successful novel after the Fentons' demonstration.

But here were these children, and some of them, bizarrely enough, seemed to... respect him? Look up to him? Words were his trade, and he still couldn't find the right ones.

It was probably at least partially because of the heavy odor of cheese hanging in the air. He had been trying to quit, but... But... You just couldn't get good dairy products in America anymore! Not since the international ban on all milk products! And he hadn't eaten any cheese since before he'd been spirited away.

It was hard to think, and William was pretty sure that he had lost some kids, especially back at the beginning when ghosts were shooting that... Stuff. Ectoplasm. Yeah, he had definitely lost kids. More than one. Maybe even half of what he had originally. It was hard to tell when they wouldn't stay still enough for him to count. The ones he still had were either crying or bouncing off the walls. It was like they had never smelled cheese before.

Well, maybe some of them hadn't. These were kids who had grown up during the dairy prohibition, after all.

"Look!" he shouted, finally. "J- Jane Eyre," he caught himself right before he started to get into his nice, comfortable blasphemy/vulgarity rut. "Will you all shut up and stop moving?"

"M-Mr Lancer?" asked Mikey, shocked. Scandalized, even.

"Shut up," he said. He rubbed his face with both hands, beard bristling against his palms. What had he done to deserve this? "This is an awful place to hide," he said. "We need to leave."

"It's a dead end," said Lester.

"I know, that's why it's terrible. We have to go back, or else we'll get trapped here."

"But the ghosts are back there," protested Lester.

"Yeah," said Ricky, who was as much of a kindred spirit as William was going to get in this bunch. "But not for a few rooms. Right?"

"Right," said William. "So- So you-" what was that kid's name?- "Rebecca, get out from under that table, we need to go."