Chapter 294: Motives for Justifiable Homicide
.
"Well," said Tucker, after Sojourn had dropped them off back in the Ghost Zone, "that was interesting."
"Sure was," said Technus.
"So… You ready to recreate the internet?"
"Man, I am hip to it and funky fresh!"
"Okay, first off, if we're working together, you need to drop the slang. It just isn't working for you."
"Hey, Tucker, you're back, good. I need your help." Ellie seized Tucker by the arm and carried him off down the hallway.
"Sure, sure," said Tucker. "How are you, Ellie, I'm fine, thanks for asking. What's the rush? Also, nice new look."
Ellie grinned and adjusted her laurel leaf crown. "Thanks, Pandora helped me with it when we went back to Elysium."
"I was wondering about the Greek Key kind of thing and the colors. But seriously, where are we going?" Tucker tugged on one of the short sleeves of her new Elysium-inspired jacket.
"You know Johnny's here, right? And his shadow?"
"Yeah?"
"Okay, now imagine the worst possible groups to run into each other."
Tucker dug his heels in. "No," he said.
"Come on, Tucker," said Ellie, pleading.
"No, I am not playing peacemaker between Dan and Mr. and Mrs. Fenton. I value both my existence and my ears."
"Oh," said Ellie. "No, it isn't them. I hadn't even considered that."
"Then who is it?"
"Well, Dan and Johnny were hanging out."
"Already a spectacularly bad matchup. Please continue."
"And, long story short, they ran into Walker."
"Since when is Walker here?"
"Danny called him over so the people who were still under mind control could be closer, remember?"
"Oh, yeah, there was something like that going on, wasn't there? But why do you think I could do anything about it?"
"You're a head of state. You're a guy who makes rules. Figure Walker might listen to you."
"And none of the other heads of state who've been hanging out around here can help because…?"
"Closed Regency Council meeting," said Ellie. "Even Danny's not allowed in."
"And Danny, who is the Prince doesn't count because…?"
"He isn't the one who makes the rules. The Regency Council does that."
"I hate to say this, but that sounds like Walker is just making up excuses. What are he and Dan even doing, anyway? Yelling at each other?"
"Oh, if only it were that simple."
.
.
.
Regardless of what else they were spending their time on, Jazz and the others were part of a diplomatic mission. Therefore: diplomacy.
"What did they want to talk to you guys about?" asked Jazz, rubbing her feet. She'd been working with Dr. Iceclaw to investigate what had happened to 'Mr. Brown' and what the man had done for the GIW. Dr. Iceclaw wasn't terribly suited for the task, but he'd been the main one to talk to the man before he'd pulled his disappearing act (not to be confused with a genuine, ghostly disappearing act).
Meanwhile, the Amity Park section of their delegation had been invited to a different meeting.
"A proposal to make Amity Park a special joint administrative region," said Pamela. "It has benefits."
"But massive problems, too," said Sam. "Namely, they only want to give humans the benefits. Might as well hang up a sign over the border that says 'no ghosts allowed.'"
Pamela made a face. "As I said, it needs some ironing."
"A lot of ironing," said Sam, still making the face.
"Yeah," said Wes, "it was pretty sketchy. They also seemed to be under the impression that Inky and Janet weren't really elected representatives. Also, that Janet was a 'she.' I mean, have you looked at it?"
Janet burbled sadly.
"Aw, no, sweetie. We know you're an it," said Jazz.
"Have you heard anything from Phantom about when Irving will be back? As crazy as it sounds, having a ghost with us who was obviously just some guy was helpful on the diplomatic front."
"No," said Jazz. "I think he's still in recovery."
"Ugh," said Wes. He sat down. "Ernesto was really enthusiastic about the proposal, though."
"I am merely trying to represent my constituents! I polled very high with the more traditional, over thirty and under one hundred demographic!"
"Wow," said Wes. "Somehow, I didn't put this together until you said that absolute monstrosity of a sentence, but politics are going to be homicidally complicated now that the actual undead are involved, aren't they?"
"Less homicide, in my experience," said the Chef, carrying in a plate of apple slices. "It's vanishingly rare for ghosts to end one another, whereas humans murder each other all over the place."
"Plus, you remember what happened to the murder rate in Amity Park after… well. Everything."
"That's not what I meant, and you know it."
"By homicidal he means students taking social studies," explained Sam. "Then again… Since we have the vote, now…"
"No, that's fair. That just means social studies classes will be higher stakes. And teens only have the vote in Amity Park, not America."
"Wait," said Dmitri, "who are they feeling homicidal about? I don't get it."
What followed was an attempt at explaining the emotions one felt when receiving a standard modern American secondary education.
.
.
.
On reflection, this was actually a terrible day in the Ghost Zone.
It turned out that much of the ointment could be salvaged, but the scientists were equally unsure of the results of phasing through it, so Danny and Damien were stuck being… well, stuck. This wouldn't have been so bad, if they weren't stuck to Walker, who was rather upset about the whole thing, currently about four times as large as he should be to comfortably use the hallway, starting to feel the effects of the ointment, and trying to arrest Dan and Johnny.
Admittedly, Danny was tempted to arrest Johnny, or at least his shadow, himself.
(Ellie had said something about a potential solution after seeing them and before running off again. Hopefully, it would be more diplomatic than Danny's current plan of "let the scientists salvage what they can, and then fight everyone.")
"Dan! Stop antagonizing him!" shouted Danny over Walker's recitation of the Rules (capital R).
"I'm not being antagonistic!"
"You're a massive antagonist! Like, the biggest antagonist! Just leave!"
"Not until I—"
The lights in the hall flickered again, and whatever Dan was about to say was lost in wordless frustration.
"Johnny," growled Damien.
"You're all under arrest! One million years!"
"Why are you even fighting?" demanded Danny.
"I don't know, he started it!" complained Johnny.
"What do you mean, I started it? Your shadow is the one who thinks it's funny to steal other people's stuff!"
Behind Danny, Damien was audibly grinding his teeth.
A scientist darted in, dodging Walker's attempts to reach down one of the hallways to snatch Johnny. Or maybe Dan. "This is just slightly acidic," she said, pouring a yellow solution over the sticky mess of the ointment. "Don't get in in your eyes."
How reassuring.
"Wait, wait," said Danny, "what are the side effects of this? Walker doesn't usually—" He rebalanced himself in the air after a tug. "Doesn't usually act like this."
"Oh, well. We aren't sure yet! But in the initial trials there was evidence to suggest that— Oops." She dropped the bottle she was holding, and yellow liquid spilled all over the floor. "My solvent!" she cried, diving for it.
It was a good thing no one was actually walking on the floor. That looked slippery.
"Suggest what?"
"Oh, that in addition to strengthening mental barriers and the like, it also increased one's, ah, single mindedness?"
"And obsessive tendencies!" called another scientist from somewhere Danny couldn't see.
Ah. That would explain some things.
"But, of course, every ghost is different—"
"Is that stuff eating through the floor?" asked Damien.
The conversation, such as it was, stopped as everyone looked at the floor. The yellow solvent was not, in fact, eating through it.
Damien cackled. "Haha! Your faces. You were so scared for a moment there!"
Great. Just great. How long would it be before it started affecting Danny, too? He couldn't let it affect him. He was the only calm one in this goose girl parody.
"Walker," he tried. This hadn't worked before, but who knew? "Remember this is Libra, if you want the two of them arrested, you just have to—"
"Libra! Those malingerers! Fancy footing around the real problems, not getting their hands dirty with 'petty' lawbreakers! Let me tell you, there are no petty lawbreakers. You've got to catch them in the bud!" The rant continued like that. "Working with them is impossible!"
"I didn't think it was possible for you to be more annoying than I remembered," said Dan, "yet here we are! With your big head getting in the way of everything!"
Wait… were Johnny and Dan on opposite sides of the intersection? They were, weren't they? Just exacerbating this whole thing. Great.
"Walker, it'll be much easier for you to arrest them if you—"
"You're under arrest, too, punk!"
"I'm, like, literally your boss." Or close enough to it that it didn't matter.
"Which makes your continual flouting of the Rules even worse! You need to be rehabilitated! You're a menace, a danger to society!"
Walker turned, clearly trying to grab Danny, but nothing was in the right position for him to do that, and he got caught on the chandelier instead. He yanked at it, making the walls shake.
Someone not directly involved in this mess began to wail.
"Try to see if you can pull it off, now," said the scientist holding the solvent bottle.
"I have been trying this whole time," said Danny, rather peevishly. "Sorry, this is just, ahk. Difficult."
"Oh, I completely understand," said the scientist. "But are you sure you're trying? Like, really trying?"
"Yes," said Danny.
"Okay, maybe I'll try this." She pulled an orange bottle out of thin air. "It's a bit stronger, so it may sting a bit!" She popped off the cap, and this time poured it on the side of the box attached to Walker.
"That's assault!" roared Walker.
"Uh oh," said the scientist, before being quite literally flattened by Walker's giant hand. She peeled off the ground like a sheet of paper. "Wow, am I glad that I can do that!"
Walker smacked at her again, but this time Danny was ready with a shield.
"Oh my gosh," he said, "can you just stop?"
"You have to teach me how to do that, Miss," said Damien, pulling to one side.
"Doctor, preferably, but Missus will do. I'm married."
"I got Tucker!"
"Oh, wow, this is chaotic. I thought you said Walker and Johnny were fighting?"
"The accomplice!"
Danny summoned a shield in front of Ellie.
"I could have handled that myself," said Ellie.
"I'm just a little bit keyed up right now," said Danny, "you understand. But why Tucker? I don't feel like—Ah! Stop moving!—he's really a fit for this. No off—eck—no offense."
"None taken. Hey! Walker! You're going to have to stop, dude!"
"Say who you are," said Ellie.
"I'm Pharoah Tucker of Duulaman's Egypt, and I'm someone who makes the rules, so—" Tucker took a step into the room and immediately slipped on the spilled solvent, falling backwards. He managed to stop himself before he hit the floor, hovering just slightly above the hard stones. "Ow."
"You didn't even hit the ground, what are you saying ow for?" asked Ellie.
"Shock!"
"You're under arrest!"
"What? No! I have diplomatic immunity!"
"That doesn't protect you from the rules!"
Dan started laughing.
"Shut up!" snapped Danny. "Shut up or contribute to solving the problem that you made!"
"Not until Shadow gives back what he took!"
What could Shadow have taken that Dan would be so mad about, anyway?
"Did he take your boots or something? You're just wearing your suit, you can regrow that whenever."
"You wouldn't get it!" There was a crash. Danny got a small flash of something square and brightly colored but set the image aside for the moment.
"Don't break stuff! This isn't our house!"
"I'll break what I want!"
Walker adjusted his position, nearly crushing Tucker with his knee, but Danny once more came to the rescue with a shield. He was starting to have a hard time, managing all these shields.
Wait. Why was he still managing all those shields? Usually he just dismissed them after they weren't actively being challenged anymore, but what if Walker went after Ellie, Tucker, or the scientists again? He couldn't risk it.
Oh. This was that increased obsessive behavior, wasn't it? Maybe he should internally be pronouncing that with a capital "O."
The shields were going to pile up fast if this kept up.
"Speaking of helping, why don't you just make him stop?"
"That's a good point," said Damien, under his breath.
"Maybe I don't want to mind control my way out of all my problems, Dan! And if you haven't noticed, because you're too busy hiding, we are literally being stuck together by something designed to strengthen mental defenses!"
"Mental strength!" corrected one of the scientists.
"Then shouldn't you be stronger, too? Just mind control him already, you goody-two-shoes!"
"I'm not going to do it! You come here and do it! Walker! Come on, you agreed to sitting down to talk to us."
"Yeah, man, if you agreed, isn't there a rule about keeping your word or something? Like, if you said you're going to do something, you've got to do it?" said Tucker. "And diplomatic immunity is totally a thing. International law, even."
"Not interdimensional law!"
"Morals, then! What are morals, but the laws of our heart? The universal Ma'at? Only, like, the philosophical kind, not the person. You know how it is."
"You did agree," said Danny, pressing at the gap Tucker had made. "You agreed to help with this, and that the people under mind control hadn't broken any rules, so, you need to follow your own rules, right?"
"That doesn't apply to them at all!"
"This is impossible," said Danny. "Maybe if Johnny and Dan left we could work with this."
"I'll leave, when I get back my stuff!"
"Your belt already melted, man," said Johnny, he sounded, just slightly, unnerved at this point.
"He doesn't care about the belt," said Danny, wanting to add something like 'you moron.' "It's about what he was carrying in the belt."
"Well, I ate the gummy worms," said Johnny. "So you can't have those back!"
"The other other things!"
"Shadow didn't hand me anything else!"
"Well, maybe he's keeping it!" Danny was starting to get seriously aggravated.
"I'm going to beat your stupid shadow like piñata until my stuff falls out, so help me God."
"Aw, come on, he's just a little guy. He doesn't know what he's doing."
"He absolutely does!" There was a loud smash.
"Oh, no," said Johnny. "He's going through the walls!"
"That's against the rules!"
"Just give him back the picture," said Danny.
"Who said it was a picture?" demanded Dan, his anger now tempered with confusion.
"We're just a decade plus away from being the same person." Danny still kept gummy worms and other snacks in his belt, sometimes. It was just bad luck that he hadn't had anything when they got zapped into the Ghost Zone during the assembly.
Okay, it wasn't bad luck. He'd eaten them that morning instead of breakfast. He'd been bored. And hungry. And running late. Gosh, it was weird what you remembered.
Not that it really mattered. They'd gotten food from his lair.
He hoped Sam and Jazz were eating right in DC…
(Why was his brain acting like this?)
"Speaking of decades," said Tucker, trying to shimmy out from under the shield protecting him (he shouldn't do that, it was dangerous), "can't you turn back time on this whole thing?"
"That was the first thing I tried, yes," said Danny.
"Try again?" suggested Ellie.
Danny mentally reached backward in time and tried to slide along—
The ground and, therefore, Walker, jostled again, breaking Danny's concentration. He hissed, annoyed. Had Dan broken down another wall?
"No luck?" asked Tucker, finally getting out from under the shield. He was immediately almost hit again, and Danny made another shield. "Dude. I could have handled that."
"I don't know if you've noticed," said Danny, "but I'm not entirely thinking clearly at the moment. Johnny! Just give him back the picture already! I don't want to deal with this for any longer than I have to, which means that if you don't resolve this clear off before we get free, I'm going to help Walker arrest you."
"Oh, come on, do you know how hard it is to make Shadow give stuff back? How important can a picture be, anyway?"
"A lot, when all the people in it are gone!"
Danny had gotten a crash course on Dan's motivations shortly before being sucked into the past, so he couldn't say he was confused about why Dan cared. Still, he hadn't expected something like this to come up.
"Uh, I know I'm not the brightest—"
"WE KNOW, JOHNNY," said everyone (except Walker, who was listing criminal codes again).
"—but I'm pretty sure everyone in that picture was still alive."
"Not in my original timeline." There was another crash indicating another broken wall.
"Holy Ancients," said Johnny. "He's mad. Why is he so mad?"
"Because you stole his stuff?" suggested Ellie. "I'm going to go see if I can pull Shadow out of whatever hole he's hiding in." Her fists lit up with light. "Wish me luck!"
"Well, I feel like I was kind of useless now… Unless you want me to try some magic?" The last was asked almost hopefully.
"Sure," said Danny, hyperaware of Damien giggling behind him. "Just as long as you don't do anything to make this worse."
"I was sort of hoping for a bit more guidance, to be honest."
"Dude, you're running a country."
"You're running a universe."
"Eh," said Damien, before returning to giggling. "I'm not sorry, this is funny."
"Slippery jerk!" shouted Ellie.
She was on the opposite side of the intersection from both Dan and Johnny. Danny could practically hear Dan steaming and changing directions. Then, there was no "practically" about it as he blazed through the intersection.
"Catch him quick, Ellie!"
"I'm trying! He keeps knocking things over onto me! Hah!"
There was a sort of shriek, and the lights stopped flickering.
"Got him! Now give it up, you sorry excuse for a sleep paralysis demon!"
"I think he's more a personification of my crappy luck, personally!" input Johnny.
"Seriously, dude," said Tucker. "Dan'll obliterate you."
"Shadow, just let go!" yelled Johnny. "Just for once, listen to me, please."
Danny knew for a fact that Shadow listened to Johnny on a fairly regular basis, and no one had forced Johnny to aggravate Dan, so his sympathy under these circumstances was limited.
"Got it!" shouted Ellie. "Huh, this is in better shape than I expected."
"Give it!" snarled Dan.
"Hey, no need to be nasty about it."
"Johnny, I'd better not see you for at least forty-eight hours. Got it?"
"Got it!" yelped Johnny. "Shadow, let's go!"
"Lawbreakers! Scoundrels! Punks!"
"Come on, Dan," said Ellie. "You can teach me how to set things on fire."
"Wait," said Tucker, "are you going to leave me here, trapped by all these shields? Danny, why are you still making shields? Stop!"
"I'm allowed to be irrational!"
"I wonder how many shield this room can fit before you start bisecting people," said Damien, blithely and with so much false innocence that Danny could taste it.
"That's why! Sorry, Tucker, you're safer here!"
Ellie did not, in fact, sound sorry.
.
.
.
The ointment was not easily soluble in the quantities involved. The scientists were, before they were able to bring in the 'heavy duty' solvents, barred from the room by Danny's growing collection of shields. Walker, similarly, was eventually hemmed in, although he became more amenable to conversation once Johnny and Dan left.
"Once this is done," said Walker, attempting to shrink himself back to his regular size and failing, "we'll never speak of this again, and that's a rule, punks."
"Agreed," said Danny.
"Blackmail material," sang Damien.
.
.
.
Needless to say, they decided against using the ointment delivery method.
