Before I say anything, I've got some important news: I'm going to a new school starting the end of October. It's great news for me, but probably not so much for my stories, since I'm there on a scholarship and I'll be working hard on keeping my grades up to par, which will likely only leave me a couple of hours each week to write a new chapter. I'll try, nonetheless, to keep up with my schedule, but in advance, I offer you guys an apology for all of my schedule slips and the inevitable change of schedule once I start emphasizing my school work. I promise that none of my stories will be abandoned, though.

largomolo: I don't blame you for feeling that way. Honestly, the past two years have just been me focusing on wrapping up loose ends. I can't promise too much, but with luck, I can update once every month and a half.

Summary: Midterms are coming up, and the Fenton Twins aren't having the best report cards. But while they try to make up extra credit, there's a wrench in the system in the form of a hunter who's looking for new trophies.

"Okay, so what's the function of mitochondria—?" Penny read off her notebook as she ducked a stray cardboard box being thrown at her. "Hey! Boxhead!" she shouted at the blue-skinned ghoul, raising a fist and shaking it at him in annoyance. "I was reading!" She gasped as another box was shot over at her head, only to be shot away by Terrence, who was hoisting a heavy-looking gun. "Thanks, Terr!"

The blond grinned at her, shooting her a thumbs up as he staggered, trying to keep the Fenton Ecto-Gun in his arms despite its weight. "Can't your dad make this thing out of, you know, aluminium alloy or something?" he shouted at the Fenton twins, groaning as the cannon-like gun was dropped onto the wooden pier of the harbour, narrowly avoiding his sneaker-clad feet. "Oh, come on! It took me five minutes to pick that up!"

Dani shrugged as the white-haired ghost girl vaporised another cardboard box that was being shot at her and her friends, dropping in front of the two human teens in order to keep them safe while Terrence struggled to pick up the ectoplasm gun again. "Can you come again, Penny?" she asked, blasting another chain of boxes that the ghost was hurling at them. "Danny, five o'clock, swoop!" she shouted, waving a hand at her brother and then pointing at some stray boxes that she hadn't been able to get rid of in time.

"Got it!" Danny, the faster of the twins, shot at the cardboard boxes, pushing each one out of the way and returning fire at the Box Ghost, as the menace had declared himself. "What was that about mitochondria?" he yelled, looking back at Penny just in time to be hit in the head with a box. "Hey! Terrence, throw me the Thermos!" He swooped down and caught the Fenton Thermos as Terrence threw it, narrowly missing it when the blond misjudged the distance. "Crap!"

Dani dove to save the Thermos, catching the chrome and green item before it crashed onto the ground and inevitably broke, releasing every single ghost that the team of four had worked to catch all night. "Terrence, work on your aim, man!" Cradling the Thermos close to her with a sigh, she turned the containment unit over to the Box Ghost. "Eat Thermos!" she shouted in a good emulation of her father, yanking off the cap and directing the nozzle at the blue-skinned menace. Slamming the cap onto it, the ghost girl huffed as she got back to her feet, dusting off her person. "Jeez!"

"Nice impression of dad," Danny said dryly as both of the twins let the white rings of their transformations pass over them, turning them back to their black-haired, blue-eyed human forms. "I'll finish this tonight. You can get some sleep after last night," he promised his younger twin as he took the Fenton Thermos. "Right, now, Penny, what was that?"

"What's the function of mitochondria in a plant cell?" Penny read, turning a page on her notebook to look at her own notes on the subject. "Let's see..."

"Mito—what?" Dani asked cluelessly, blinking as she stared at her Asian friend. "What's a mito-mitochondria?"

Terrence finally managed to get the heavy gun off the ground. "Oh, come on, Dani, Miss Mary just covered this in biology this morning," the blond pointed out. "It's the factory of the cell, where breathing occurs and energy is produced." Hefting the gun up in his arms, even as his arms were shaking from the strain, Terrence pulled a face that resembled a pained grimace. "Ow, my arms."

Danny just groaned, rubbing at one of his blue eyes. "Dani and I were napping to make up for lost sleep in Biology," he lamented with a frown. "We're spending a lot of time recently with these late-night roundups, you know. Last night, Dani and I had a late-night emergency down in the lab too, so we lost about... half an hour of sleep?"

"One hour," Dani corrected, the girl scratching her head with a grimace. "I conked out in class once my butt was sat on the chair. I hate those slimy little octopi — octopuses... octopodes? Octopodes — I hate those octopodes so much. They keep on slipping out of my hands when I catch them right there!" She buried her face in her hand with a loud groan. "Stupid ghost octopodes."

Danny shrugged, the black-haired boy stifling a yawn as he tucked the Thermos closer to his body. "Yeah, an hour, and we all got back to bed at midnight as it was. Dani conks out pretty hard if she doesn't get her hours in and I'm not much different." He ran a hand through his short hair with a groan. "This is going to be horrible," he grumbled, "at this rate, we're going to both fail our Bio. We can't keep doing these roundup sessions, especially not with the midterms coming up soon."

Penny frowned. "Well, we could try alternating, maybe? You and Dani share most of your classes, and if one of you is out of it for the day, the other can get notes down for the both of you. Terrence and I manage fine as we do now, so we can both come along nightly too."

Dani shook her head. "I dunno, guys. It's alright for a short-term solution, I don't think it's going to be good for us in the long run."

"We can figure something out tomorrow," Terrence offered, hefting the gun up in his arms. "Don't worry, Dannies. We'll get a solution down for you. Now we've got the Biology exam first thing tomorrow and you two need the sleep." He pointed the barrel of the gun in his hands to point at the two half-ghosts, which prompted them to step back nervously before he realised his mistake and lowered the gun. "Sorry."

Danny exhaled slowly. "Yeah... that's a good idea, I think. C'mon, let's get home and get some sleep. It's long overdue."

Unknown to the group of four as they began going their separate ways, there was someone observing them. Neon green metal eyes lit up in glee as a hunter set down his binoculars, a wide, maniacal grin spreading across a metallic, bolted face.

Next targets sighted.

"How did we get talked into extra credit again?" Dani asked as she and Danny stood in front of the purple-back gorilla exhibit in Amity Park Zoo. The girl adjusted her red beanie and tapped her mechanical pencil on her notepad a few times, staring unblinkingly at the massive ape that was inside the metal bars of the cage, watching it as it did basically nothing else other than lazing about in its cage. Or was it a he? Dani glanced over at the shiny plaque that was beside the cage and read the minute scrawl, scrunching her face up at how hard it was to read — she needed glasses, but heck if she was going to ask for them!

Danny grumbled beside her, his notepad scrawled over with some notes, but not much that was actually useful was on the lined paper, only some random notes that they'd got from the plaque over there and some silly little doodles that he'd made while he was bored of seeing Sampson — the gorilla's name, apparently — scratch its own behind for the fifth time in the hour. It was easy to see that her brother had little patience for this kind of thing, and it wasn't hard to see why he was struggling to keep up with Biology, either. "Not sure," he said with a huff, blowing his black hair out of his eyes. "Terr and Penny decided that making up our lost grades was more important than ghost-hunting with us."

That morning had been a disaster. The Fenton twins had got their last Biology test's results back with big red Ds printed on the top right corners, indicating that, yes, that was yet another failed grade for them and another indication that their grades were indeed suffering for their late-night ghost hunting sessions. When Terrence and Penny had both got relatively stellar grades of an A and a B respectively, they'd decided that it was high time for the twins to shape up.

Which was what had led to where the Fenton duo was now, in front of a stupid monkey's cage and looking at it without seeing anything special in the slightest. Their best friends, on the other hand, had got their equipment and gone out to hunt for the ghosts that plagued Amity Park on their own. Not that Dani doubted their abilities or anything of the sort, but— alright, she totally didn't think that they'd get through the night alright. It wasn't going to be a fun night when all they were reduced to doing was shooting at really nimble and always moving targets, after all.

"This is so useless," the black-haired girl groused, folding her arms over her chest. "It's just a stupid primate. What're we going to learn by writing a report on it — how to scratch our behinds?" And all because we were up all night before a test too. Dani felt like burying her face in her hands like she had when she'd got her test paper, but the teen just puffed out her cheeks and sighed. "We've been standing here for hours. It's almost closing time too," she complained. "What've we got for a report? Zilch. Nil. Nada. Nothing." She snapped her notebook shut with a ferocity that probably wasn't needed, but the girl was nothing short of annoyed that she'd practically wasted her afternoon.

"This is so awkward. I think the zoo attendant's giving us weird looks too," Danny added with a short groan as he started packing up his things after standing where he was for so long. "We can come back tomorrow, maybe. Maybe we'll have something more interesting to find, then," he said, more willing to cut his losses than Dani herself was, apparently. Suddenly, his eyes widened and he pulled Dani closer. "Am I seeing things, or is that Sam Manson hiding behind the Siberian Tiger exhibit?"

The dark-haired teen cocked her head to a side and peered at the metal cages of the exhibit, peering past the white-coated creature to see the Goth A-lister standing there, hiding in a really conspicuous manner that didn't really do much. They hadn't chosen a good place to hide, all things considered, since she was wearing bright purple and black against the orange and black coats of the felines. "If you're seeing things, then I am too," the younger Fenton replied. "She's not hiding very well, actually, is she?" she asked her brother.

"Not at all. That's why I was asking." Danny blinked at a sudden bout of noise from Sampson and turned around just in time to see something flying at him and Dani. "Move, Dani!" he barked, pulling her out of the way with him. The projectile hit the ground and exploded out into a glowing green net, much to the perplexion of the Fenton twins. "What the—?"

While they were puzzling over the net that had just emerged from apparently nowhere, the purple-back gorilla had apparently got itself free from the metal cage it was closed in, and it burst out with a shriek.

Dani's eyes widened at the sight and she gaped as the gorilla pulled a chrome figure with a flaming green mohawk out from the bushes and began to give it a good beatdown. "Is that a ghost?" she asked, still gobsmacked at the sight, pointing at the chrome person with metal panels screwed in all over the 'skin'. "Or an android...?" her voice trailed up in surprise. "Erm, nevermind, I think. Sampson's doing pretty well, isn't it?"

"I'll say," the older twin agreed before he paused, realising that he'd forgotten something crucial. "Oh dang it. I forgot the extra Thermos in the basement this morning," he said with a groan. "We're going to have to hunt down Terr and Penny to get this one taken care of. I told them that it was a bad idea to have them go ghost-hunting on their own." He hit his forehead with a huff before he turned to Dani. "Go Ghost?"

"Go Ghost," Dani said with a nod. White rings formed at her waist and around Danny's before it split apart in two and proceeded to move over their bodies, transforming them into their ghost form. Thankfully, no one was paying attention, since the zoo attendants were busy with the other exhibits and Manson was fixated with the gorilla-ghost fight. "Heads up, Dan!" the white-haired ghost girl called, swerving out of the way as Sampson threw the chrome-plated ghost over at them. Her fists lit up with ectoplasm as she prepared to deliver another beatdown on the ghost.

Before she could make a move, though, something dropped onto the ground, clinking and drawing attention to it. Dani stared down at the small circular pellet that had rolled at her feet, gasping in surprise when it started spitting out green gas. She covered her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut in case it was toxic or corrosive, raising her hands up to cover her face. Much to her displeasure, when she opened her eyes again, the ghost was gone.

"You alright, Dani?" her brother asked, coughing as he waved a hand in front of his face to wave away any lingering gas. The white-haired ghost boy was scowling too. "Looks like he got away. Let's just get Sampson back in his cage for now," he said with a sigh, running a hand through his hair as he carefully lowered himself back onto the ground. "I hate to admit it, but it's kind of a good thing that he got away," he admitted, still in his ghost form as he walked over to Sampson. "We would have been wasting our time unless we had a Thermos on hand too."

Dani huffed as she flew over to the purple-backed gorilla. "True," she muttered begrudgingly. "And he'd have an idea of how we fought too, so for now, we still have the advantage of surprise. The bad news is that we don't know a thing about him either," she pointed out. She glanced at Sampson and sighed a little — she supposed the ape wasn't that bad if it could give a ghost a good beating. "Come on, boy," she muttered with a frown. "Back in your cage."

The gorilla almost seemed to whine, but Danny shook his head apologetically. "Appreciate the help, Sampson, but you need to go back for now," he told it firmly. "Maybe our report can give you a bigger enclosure?" he suggested almost jokingly with a glance at Dani, who just shook her head. "In you go, boy."

With Sampson back in his cage once again, the Fenton twins returned back to their human forms and picked up their discarded notebooks.

"You don't reckon we can write that Sampson beat up a ghost for us, can we?" Dani asked as she and Danny began walking towards the exit of Amity Park Zoo.

Danny snorted at the suggestion. "In your dreams, Dani."

She sighed. "Worth a try."

The twins successfully crept back into their room, sneaking around some kind of journalist there to interview their mother for some kind of magazine.

Danny groaned softly as the black-haired teen entered his shared room with his sister, kicking off his sneakers as he headed to the other end of the room from the entrance to dump his bookbag. "Dani, throw me my phone, please?" he asked as he made his way over to the end of their room, covered in posters of planets, stars, and astronauts. No sooner had the words left his mouth did the black-haired boy find himself on the floorboards, weighed down by a metal-chained net that had suddenly been dropped on him and his twin, who had just been behind him.

"Oh for goodness sake," Dani grumbled as she clawed at the net, rubbing at her head, "what is it now?" Trying to worm free of the net, the black-haired girl had nearly succeeded when a heavy metal combat boot slammed down on one of the links, inches away from crushing her hand. "Hey!" she hissed, withdrawing almost immediately as her first reaction. She glanced up. "...oh, should've known, huh?"

The older twin joined his sister in looking at the owner of the boot, only to see the same robotic ghost that Sampson the gorilla had just had the pleasure of beating senseless earlier that day — heck, he even still had the dents in his metal exterior to show it. "You!" Danny shouted, gripping the net. "What do you want with us?" His tone, while hard and angry, also held a bit of the same annoyance that had crept into Dani's voice — they'd both wasted an entire afternoon at the zoo and they were no closer to making up for their nearly failing grades for it.

The ghost glared right back with solid neon green eyes, his flaming mohawk growing in size. "You're awfully mouthy for a piece of game," the ghostly android growled in a deep voice. "I hope your heads won't be as chatty once I take them and mount them on my wall!" Producing a large-barrelled gun from who-knows-where, the ghost took aim at Danny's head.

"Dani?" the older twin asked, already halfway into transforming.

"Already beat you to it," his sister answered, the white-haired ghost girl now sinking into the floor, followed quickly by the older of the two, now in his ghost form as well.

They shot back out of the floor and out through the walls of the house, escaping the metal net, but their windows weren't half as fortunate, quickly getting shattered by a shot from the gun. The twins flew up into the air, keeping close together as they got ready to fight, only to be forced to fly apart moments later as the metal ghost flew through the broken window, shooting his gun at them.

"You're just mere prey!" he snarled. "Don't think you can escape the likes of Skulker, the Ghost Zone's greatest hunter!" Skulker shot after them, and though the twins were outflying him at first, he soon caught up, and Danny could see why — his metal boots had warped into rockets, speeding him across through the air to gain distance on the escaping twins.

Danny grimaced as he attempted a manoeuvre to escape the rapidly approaching Skuler, trying to get himself out of the range of the house where either of the Fenton parents could potentially find them and attack them. An idea hit him as he weaved through the rooftops of Amity Park's buildings. Basement, Dani! We can corner him and force him back into the portal! Making a sharp 180-degree turn mid-air, Danny swerved upwards quickly to avoid one of Skulker's thrown nets, leaving it tangled in a tree as he shot back towards his house.

Turning invisible, the Fenton twins phased through the doorway of their house and down into the basement, banking on their prediction and hopes that Skulker could manage to get down into the basement without getting the attention of their parents. A loud crash and the yelling of their father soon proved that the mechanical ghost had indeed failed in the latter task. Danny shot his twin a glance and they both detransformed just in time to witness Skulker burst into the basement door, his flaming green mohawk put out and his metal body dripping with red curry — the same curry their mother had been making for dinner, Danny realised.

Skulker snarled. "I've got you now!" he roared, raising his arm and letting a raygun pop out of the back of his wrist as he pointed it at the twins.

"Not so fast, ghost!" Jack boomed, and a loud, metallic clang was heard as the twins' stocky father bashed the metal hunter in the back of his chrome head with what looked to be a monkey wrench.

Skulker staggered and stumbled down the stair, falling until he had landed in a rather undignified position on the basement floor.

Acting on instinct, Dani grabbed the nearby Thermos that Danny had neglected to grab that morning and pointed it at the hunter. "Gotcha this time!" she cried, a hand on the Thermos cap. "Eat Thermos!"

"You haven't seen the last of me!" Skulker snarled as Dani pulled the cap, and before the swirling vortex could pull him in, he fired a blast at it from his wrist gun, clogging the entrance with some kind of green ectoplasm before the ghost promptly disappeared.

"Aw, dang it," Dani mumbled, disappointed that she hadn't managed to capture the metal pain in the behind, but Jack was pleased enough as their father practically skipped down the stairs, pulling them both into a tight hug. "Dad!" the girl wheezed. "Can't breathe!"

"Sorry, my little ghost hunters!" their father said with a delighted sigh. "Finally, my kids are taking an interest in ghost hunting! Oh, Mads is going to be so happy to hear this!" he gushed.

Despite himself, Danny just smiled and glanced over at Dani, who mirrored his expression. Even if they hadn't caught Skulker this time, seeing their dad this happy was always a plus.

"So you're saying that this Skulker guy is trying to hunt you two?" Terrence asked as the quartet walked to school, the blond walking with his hands behind his head and his bag slung over his body. He'd been listening to the Fenton twins talk about what had happened the previous day while the boy and Penny had been ghost-hunting in their stead. It had gone somewhat well, at first, he supposed, but without the two half-ghosts with them, efficiency had greatly suffered and neither of the two teens had got away entirely unscathed.

Well, Penny could, if one didn't count loosing about a centimetre off her front bangs, which she normally tied back anyway.

He himself had got few scratches on his left leg while scrambling to pick up the ridiculously heavy ectogun — he knew that it was designed for the twins' father, but goodness gracious, that thing probably weighed a ton or something! It was a miracle that he could pick it up in the first place, especially since he wasn't that blessed in the upper body department. Maybe next time he could try operating the dang thing with his feet? He had some pretty strong quads, after all...

"That's what we said," Dani grumbled, the girl tugging her red beanie down over her hair. "Threw a couple of nets at us yesterday, managed to rig our bedrooms somehow with rope nets triggered by kicking off a blanket and he even tried blasting us in our own house! He wanted to mount our heads on a wall or something like we're a bunch of trophies to a hunter."

"Which he is," Danny added. "Basically we're prize stags and it's open season for deer hunting," he likened, motioning with his hands as he spoke. The black-haired teen shook his head. "That's the closest comparison I can muster right now, and it's looking pretty apt. I'm pretty sure he wants to taxidermy our dead bodies and put us up on a rack to display." The morbid description was accompanied by a full-body shudder from him.

Dani scoffed. "And Mr Lancer wonders why our grades are slipping," she grumbled.

Penny, who had remained almost eerily silent up until now, piped up with a suggestion, "Why not let him come at you, then?" At the confused looks she was getting from the group, the Asian girl proceeded to elaborate. "He's hunting you like a predator does prey, right? If you're the only prey he has, then it'll only be natural that he keeps coming when you continually evade him. He'll finally catch you if he manages to tire you out, too, so your only option is to let him come to you and defeat him then. Lure him to a place where you know you'll have free reign to mess with him and when he comes, boom!" She smacked her balled fist into her open palm. "You've got the jump on him!"

"That's not a bad idea," Dani agreed with a hum and a nod. "If he wants to catch us, we'll let him, and when he gets too close, we'll fight back and then we can go full-on with the beatdown! We can even get Sampson in on it if he likes beating up ghosties so badly!" she suggested enthusiastically. "If we had had the Thermos on hand yesterday, we'd have got an easy catch!"

Danny hefted his bookbag higher up his shoulder as the quartet entered the school. "Hey, speaking of Sampson, how did the big guy get out of his cage in the first place, anyway? I'm glad that he got out in time to save our behinds from Skulker and all, but isn't his enclosure locked from the outside? He might have opposable thumbs, but I sorely doubt that the big guy's got the dexterity to break a lock open from inside the bars."

The group stopped at their lockers in the hallways, with the Fenton twins' lockers placed side-by-side and both Terrence and Penny's beside each other on the opposite side of the hall, each taking their respective books for their first period out.

"Say, isn't the hallway a little too silent today?" Terrence wondered as he shut his locker, his Biology textbook in hand. Even as the blond fidgeted with the lock to shut it entirely, he was peeking both ways down the hall to look at the oddly empty corridor. "Where are the A-listers?" he questioned. "Aren't they usually flooding the halls right about now?"

And it was true — the hallways weren't filled with the A-listers and suck-ups that crowded around said popular kids. A few stray students littered the hallways at their lockers, but the mass conglomeration of students was oddly absent that particular morning.

"Huh, that's odd," Penny said, leaning against her locker and folding her arms over her chest, her Calculus book in hand. "Manson is usually around at this time. Her Goth-wannabe followers aren't present either. Is she absent?"

"Didn't you guys hear?" a passing girl from their class called as she passed with her boyfriend. "Sam Manson got arrested last night for trying to free a gorilla from its exhibit at the Amity Park Zoo. Probably won't have a lasting record considering her parents, but she's in trouble for now."

"Thanks, Sara!" Dani called. She turned back to her brother. "That answers your question. No wonder we saw Manson at the zoo yesterday."

Terrence knew better than to assume Dani was bothered by that. In fact, the smile he was seeing said enough.

"Is he really going to come?" Dani grumbled from a distance to where Penny was hiding with Terrence behind the bushes. The twins had decided to listen to Penny's suggestion after all and had come to the Zoo with both their friends as backup just in case, all of them equipped either with a Thermos or in Terrence's case, the cumbersome ectogun weapon to take down Skulker. The twins, in their ghost forms to properly draw out the ghost hunter, had insisted on the Zoo for a reason they refused to specify, though Penny had a vague idea as to why, and the twins were right in front of it.

Danny shrugged, the white-haired ghost boy hovering in the air in front of Sampson's caged enclosure with the Fenton Thermos in hand — empty, of course. The quartet had had the misfortune of learning that the Fenton creations, with the strange exception of the ectogun Terrence currently held, were all extremely fragile and tended to malfunction upon dropping. Danny had wondered aloud how his parents had never noticed that, only for his twin to remind him that the Fenton Thermoses had never actually been used until the twins had started ghost-fighting. "Probably. I don't think he'll pass up the chance to catch us if Penny's assessment is correct."

"Let's hope miss psychologist has been brushing up," Dani mumbled, just loud enough for Penny to overhear, accompanied with a sigh. "Wanna play some 'I Spy' before Skulker gets here?"

"I should've brought my game phone," Terrence muttered beside Penny, earning him an annoyed look from the Asian girl. "What?" he whined, a pleading look in his dark blue eyes. "It's been half an hour and the heaping hunk of junk hasn't shown up yet! I'm justified, right, guys?" When neither of the two human teens received a response, the blond dance champion repeated himself. "Right, guys?" Still no response. Terrence frowned as he looked at Penny. "Dannies?"

Penny stood up from her half-seated position behind the bush to peer at their half-ghost friends. "Hush, Terr," she said, her brown gaze raking across the enclosure. "I think Dani just fell asleep. Danny's looking pretty tuckered out himself. I guess they really haven't been sleeping well, huh, Terrence?" she asked, leaning her head on her arms as she looked at her two friends. "Ghost-hunting has probably taken a lot out of them. Maybe we should write them up a schedule after all this so they can actually rest for once."

Her blond friend stood up and looked over as well, taller than the petite Asian girl already despite not yet having hit puberty — he was a late bloomer, Terrence claimed, being probably the only one in their year whose voice had yet to crack. "Aw, that's so cute," he gushed at the sight of Danny letting his sister lean on him as they both started dozing off against the bars of the gorilla's enclosure. "I'll make sure to keep that on the to-do list," he promised Penny. "They take this 'hero' thing way too seriously. No wonder their grades are slipping." He noted it down in his phone's memo pad. "Let's talk to Jazz tomorrow, actually. Maybe they need the tuition too."

The Asian girl hummed in agreement just as Sampson began to make a general ruckus inside his cage, banging on the metal bars and startling the Fenton twins awake. "He's here! Hide!" she hissed, ducking back under the cover of the bush to grab the Fenton Thermos given to her in case Danny dropped and broke his.

The blond joined her, and they peered through the bush, brushing aside leaves to watch as the white-haired twins prepared themselves for a fight, though Danny's hands rested on the enclosure's lock for an oddly long period of time. Terrence managed to heft the ectogun up enough to aim at the twins' general area so he could get a shot in if the twins needed help. "I see him!" Terrence called to her in a hushed voice, preparing to fire the gun.

"Hey, not yet," the girl chided her friend as she watched the half-ghost twins evade and zip around Skulker as the metal ghost appeared, trying to catch them with various traps and weapons. She was glad that the twins were as flexible as they were, or else it would have been very hard indeed to get themselves past several of the more precariously placed traps. "Okay, get a lock on him — Danny and Dani have him distracted and—"

"Fire in the hole!" Terrence cheered, despite it being the wrong expression, as he let loose a barrage of plasma bolts from the ectogun, successfully pummelling the robotic ghost hunter with them without Skulker dodging it, as the ghost had his back to the bushes. "These bushes are thick, man," he commented, firing at Skulker as the ghostly hunter tried to evade the blasts that were chipping away at his metal body.

"Argh! You annoyances won't stop me from capturing my prey!" Skulker roared, turning around to fire a blast of ectoenergy from a ray gun he had mounted upon his wrist. The green blast shot right into the bushes, thankfully not hitting either of the teens, but it did manage to hit the broad side of the gun, sending it out of Terrence and Penny's grasp.

Another blast followed, and the two human teens scrambled out of the way and towards the gun, hoping to reach it. Penny was the relative closest to the weapon, but even if she did manage to reach it, she was nowhere near as physically strong as Terrence was, even if she was the better athlete.

"Hey, ugly! Pick on someone your own size!" Danny shouted from behind Skulker, pelting him with bolts of green energy as the hunter tried to eliminate Terrence and Penny from the picture. "Leave them out of this — it's us you want!" Neon green eyes bright as he blasted away, the older of the Fenton Twins went full offensive, taking all the attention away from his sister as she flew up behind Skulker to deliver an ectoenergy-enhanced right hook to the back of his chrome head, leaving a dent.

Dani grimaced and flexed her fingers, but she didn't look perturbed. "Come and get us, punk try-hard!" she shouted, shooting past the hunter to appear at Danny's side. She made the universal 'come and get me' motion with her right hand, and with Danny beside her, the twins phased through the bars of Sampson's enclosure.

"You think these bars will stop me?" Skulker roared, phasing in after them to stand menacingly in front of the twins, towering over them by a good head.

"Nope, but Sampson will," Dani answered with a cheeky grin.

"Now, boy!" Danny called with a whistle, and both the Fenton twins flew back to land on the floor of Sampson's enclosure, just as a purple and black blur shot out to football tackle Skulker to the ground. The white-haired teen turned away with a grimace as the gorilla soundly delivered the ghost a beatdown, though Dani was actively cheering for the ape with a whoop.

Penny finally clawed herself to her feet with Terrence's help and both looked over at the enclosure, wincing occasionally in unison as Sampson delivered another solid punch to Skulker's metal body. "Ooh, that's going to leave a mark," she mumbled to the blond, who had managed to roll the practically impervious gun back towards the bushes.

"You're talking, sister," Terrence agreed with a grimace as Sampson gave the robotic ghost one last hard punch, smashing the hunter's head right through and pulling back with... a green blob-like thing in the gorilla's fist? "Is that really him?"

"Apparently so," Danny said, unscrewing the Fenton Thermos to capture Skulker's true form. "Looks like he really was compensating for something."

Penny snorted at the statement. "Right... remind me to remind you about brushing up on your humour."

"So... we still have nothing for our Biology extra-credit report, and it's due tomorrow," Dani pointed out as she turned back into her human form, walking over to the gorilla to give it a pat on the back for its help. "Thanks for the help, Sampson, but we still don't have much to write about you." Her shoulders slumped as she sighed, obviously frustrated with everything that had gone on to waste their time. She paused. "Dan...? You might want to pass the Thermos to someone and come look at this," she said.

"What?" the older twin asked, transforming back too and handing the Thermos to Terrence. "...oh... oh! How did no one find this out before this?"

Penny raised a brow. "What's all the commotion about?" she asked, swiping the Thermos from Terrence before the blond could drop up while he struggled with the gun.

"Let's just say Sampson should be called 'Deliah'," the twins chorused in unison.

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