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Chapter 274: Behind Door Number One
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Dmitri startled when Sojourn did, looking up at his parent with wide eyes.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I'm… not sure," said Sojourn, who reached up, as if to stroke the fabric of space and time. "That's interesting. That's not supposed to happen."
"What?"
"Someone, your cousin Dan, I believe, given the similarities to Nephthys, opened a portal," said Sojourn, "but there's interference. I haven't seen anything like this in… Goodness, I'm not sure how long. Long enough. He must have dug up something truly old."
"Are you going to have to go?" asked Dmitri, trying not to feel too pathetic for asking. Sojourn was the Ancient Master of Space. He had responsibilities beyond sitting here, waiting for the doctors to fix Dmitri after his frankly embarrassing episode of being mind controlled. If he had just stayed put like he'd been told…
"No," said Sojourn, rather decisively for how long he'd paused before answering. "No, I will stay here. Nephthys can handle this, I'm sure."
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The president was there when the ghosts delivered 'Ms. Forest,' also known as Miss Green, legal name Chloe Chandler. He'd met her several times. He'd never particularly liked her, but she'd been fine. He thought his relationship with her was fine. The rest of his wife's family had been fine.
At least, he'd thought so.
He'd thought he was a pretty good judge of character, too, but look at how that had turned out. God above, he was incompetent.
Chloe glared at him defiantly as the ghost unwrapped itself from her body. "I won't apologize," she said. "I did what the human race needed me to do."
"You think the human race needs a war with the afterlife? Really, Chloe?" The president wasn't a great aficionado of fantasy or science fiction, but even he had come across the theme of not fighting death, of how death always won, one way or another.
Death was… unstoppable, inevitable.
Unless one was a ghost, of course. But that was the point, as far as the president was concerned. America didn't need a war with an immortal army, each member of which had Superman's powers plus.
"The human race needs to be defended from creatures like those, things pretending to have souls, things pretending to be our dearly departed and trying to destroy us with their lies."
The president sighed. "What exactly were you planning with all this?" he asked. "What exactly were you and Showenhower trying to do with that ghost army? What were you trying to do, kidnapping me? The ghost delegation?"
"It wasn't a kidnapping. You would have been in protective custody. You would have been reinstated once we removed their ghostly influence from you. Freakshow would have been dealt with. He's an idiot."
"Well, he hasn't been, has he?" snapped the president. "He's off, doing who knows what with a whole army of foreign citizens who are mind controlled." There just weren't any laws that covered the situation. Not directly. Coercion maybe could cover most of it. If they decided mind control counted as coercion. There weren't exactly any precedents. Unless there was something in Amity Park's law. It wouldn't really matter, though, seeing as the city had seceded from the United States, so any of their rulings were kind of… questionable. Legally speaking.
"If you hadn't let the ghosts corrupt you, there wouldn't be," said Chloe, completely confident.
"Just…" The president sighed. She was insane, and he'd somehow had missed it, but this conversation needed to be delegated to someone who had experience with interrogations. Not him. He signaled the CIA and FBI agents who had been on standby to take her.
(Both agencies had given good arguments as to why they should be the ones to get first crack at her, but the president hadn't been in the mood for such an argument.)
"Alright," he said, out loud, once he was (relatively) alone in the room. "Time to talk to Jasmine Fenton."
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"Sir? Your highness?"
Danny looked up from the book he was reading, blinking strain out of his eyes. Neither the subject matter nor the language was particularly difficult – Middle English was easy – but whoever had written this had the worst handwriting. Someone had indulged themselves upon learning how cheap paper was in some parts of the Infinite Realms, evidently, and the rather watery ink wasn't helping matters.
"Yes?" he said.
"We weren't able to get very much from the prisoner before she was delivered to the humans," said the ghost, "but this is a copy of everything we learned about the magics she and Freakshow used. I am familiar with some of the involved concepts and can help you should you have questions."
"Thank you," said Danny, putting down the book and accepting the offered documents. Maybe he would have better luck with this. Aglaophotis wasn't a dead end, at least not yet, but trying to hunt down variants of it that weren't endangered or simply beyond rare was frustrating.
Maybe he should try not to be, though. He hadn't even been working on this for a day.
"She really didn't know what she was doing, did she?" asked Danny, after a moment perusing the papers.
"Not on the mystical side, at least," said the ghost. "It seems like she left a lot of that to Freakshow. She just knew enough to keep herself safe and keep Freakshow from assuming complete control, beyond hers. She didn't care for," and here the ghost's voice dripped with scorn, "minutiae."
"Hm," said Danny. "Yeah. There's not… this is really vague." He rubbed his chin, and Damien floated over to peek at the papers over his shoulder. "Are you analyzing her tools as well? The jewelry?"
"We're still working on that, your highness, but it appears to match with our expectations so far."
"Okay," said Danny. There were, after all, very few materials that could facilitate the control of ghosts like that, no matter how they were treated. "Are these binding?" he asked, pointing at one of the patterns.
"Ah, it isn't really similar to known binding runes, magic staves, or circles," said the ghost. "We think it might actually be for amplification."
Danny and the ghost put their heads together for several more minutes.
"You think it might wear off on its own?" asked Danny, surprised.
"Well, yes. For most kinds of mind control, the control decays the longer the victim stays away from the source, or something connecting them to the source."
"So, when do you think that might happen?"
"That's the problem. If there is decay in this case, it's slow. Slower than any of us have seen."
Danny nodded. Apart from a few ghosts who had been identified and freed by friends and acquaintances leaning on their Obsessions, none of them had been freed. None of them had snapped out of it. At this point, they were being shipped off to Walker's prison for safety reasons, and Danny hated it. He wanted them free.
But without that, he wanted some confirmation that they'd be free eventually.
"No idea then?"
"I'm afraid not," said the ghost.
"We've been looking into alternate solutions to aggravating Obsessions," said Danny. That was rather dangerous, after all, given that ghosts tended to be violent if their Obsessions were threatened. "Aglaophotis and other herbal remedies. Do you think that would help with these types of things?" He tapped the sheaf of papers.
"It may. Historically, such things do help. On occasion, Lethean tinctures help," said the ghost. "I heard once about someone having success with Stygian fruits, although there was some debate about whether or not they ghost was actually freed from control, or if the control was only transferred, as, well, with your ability."
"Right," said Danny. "Well, since you aren't working on the interrogation anymore, can I put you and the others on finding solutions based on what you found out?"
"Of course, your highness."
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Dan groaned. The last time he'd felt this crappy, he'd just been blown up by an entire oil tanker. Which. Why had there even been an entire oil tanker right next to the site of a stupidly avoidable sauce-fueled explosion?
Whatever. It was in the past. Sort of. He wasn't sure it had ever actually happened in this timeline. Clockwork's meddling made everything weird as heck.
He pushed himself up and surveyed his surroundings.
"What," he said. He blinked, hard, even though his eyes didn't really water or anything like that. He was in the Ghost Zone, but the place was entirely unfamiliar to him. The dirt was a shade of teal and shiny red and green beetles burrowed through it. Patches of bright yellow moss twitched and moved on its own. The sky was green swirled with orange, curls of land floated overhead, weirdly congruent with the curves of the clouds. The air smelled slightly of cinnamon and decay.
There were no signs of intelligent habitation.
Johnny Thirteen and Shadow didn't count and wouldn't count even if the two of them spent all their time there.
Dan stood up, walked over to his erstwhile enemy, and kicked him. Not hard. Well, yes, hard, but not as hard as he could have kicked him. If Johnny had been human, he might have earned some broken ribs from that. As it was, he was a ghost and much more durable than that. All that happened was that he yelped and then stared wildly around, taking in first the alien surroundings and then Dan.
"Where am I and who are you?" he asked, wide-eyed.
"Your worst nightmare," said Dan, fully prepared to shove Shadow down Johnny's throat if he didn't make himself useful in a hurry.
"Don't quote Batman at a time like this," said Johnny, hysterically. "What the heck! I was…" He trailed off, feeling over his body. "The punk never left me in his freaky thermos for that long. I feel all… Ugh! And now I'm out here? Where is this?"
"I should be asking you that," snapped Dan, pulling Johnny up by the lapels of his jacket. "I was just making a portal to catch Freakshow, and your stupid Shadow messed it up."
"Hey, hey, man, I totally get you had a guy you were trying to catch. I totally do. One hundred percent. You were trying to have a fight, right? I can get that; I can get that. I like to fight, too sometimes. I was having a fight with the man just a bit ago. But, like, it isn't my fault you had a bit of bad luck, you know?"
"This is above and beyond 'a bit of bad luck,'" snarled Dan, "and it's your Shadow that caused this, so it is your fault."
"I mean, uh," said Johnny, casting a panicked glance at Shadow, who was still on the ground, slightly fuzzy and transparent around the edges. "It isn't like, he isn't mine, right, and we can't really help the luck, you know? It's just what it is. I mean, I don't even know what I was doing, or what you were doing, that we got in the way of one of your portals."
"You don't remember?" demanded Dan, suspiciously.
"No!"
"What's the last thing you remember?"
"Uh, being in that giant thermos thing. That tank, with everyone else. It was so weird, I thought I was going to become soup or something. Have you ever been in the punk's thermos? It was like that. Except… Being in there that long… It was brutal."
Dan stared at Johnny tiredly and full of unwanted irony. "So, you're useless," he said, dropping the ghost. Johnny, of course, didn't fall, but floated right where Dan had let him go. Dan started muttering. "Don't know where I am, don't know how to get back…"
"Can't you just open up another portal or something?"
"I would," said Dan, "but my portals open to very specific places, and none of them are very useful right now. I need to be where I was before."
"Well, yeah, but at least you'll know where you are?" said Johnny. "But it doesn't seem like, you know, your portals do only open to specific places, because of the whole… not knowing where you are thing. Unless… is this one of your specific places? Only, it didn't seem like it. Because you don't know where we are."
As much as Dan hated to admit it, Johnny had a point.
"Fine," he hissed, and tore reality with the same ease with which a lesser being might rip thin cloth. He considered abandoning Johnny and his unlucky shadow here, but immediately thereafter considered the amount of grief his – Danny and Jazz would give him over a decision like that and decided against it. "Get your stupid shadow and come on," he ordered.
Barely waiting for Johnny to drape Shadow's disturbingly flat and dimensionless body over his shoulder, Dan strode through the portal…
… and into an equally empty and unfamiliar landscape.
"For the record," said Dan, "I blame you."
