8. PRELUDE
"The Fires of Sanctum Sanctorum were often used by the angels and devils of ancient times to facilitate communication with the earthly-ones''. Blue solemnly talked. "In many ancient texts, the humans' mentions of 'holy places' refer to territories exclusively used by superior beings to give them messages and knowledge." Her explanation flowed as she passed a glowing white sphere from one hand to another.
"So… this… magic balls work like anchors for portals between Hell and Heaven?" Dan interrupted, bored with so much ceremony. The girl spoke like such artifacts were important people. (Great, he thought, he had a history nerd giving him orders).
The daughter of the Neutral-one held the sphere with both hands and looked at the faint reflection of her own image. The surface was comparable to that of a pearl, smooth and imperfect, a jewel just hard enough to hide it's real fragility; yet touching it was like holding a small flame— a force that could easily grow out of all control and destroy it all, and a faint gleam that could die at any moment.
"Not exactly portals." She said almost immediately. "That would imply a sense of ordinary functionality when this is really a superb event. As I was saying… there are, also, places believed to be entrances to Hell, like Mount Avernus by the Romans or the cenotes by the Mayans, where these fires used to be activated by devils of old."
"Yeah… sure, and you're about to tell me why...?" Sigh. Of all beings in creation, Blue wondered, why did she have to deal with this brutish, ignorant troglodyte? A little sense of respect could do him some good...
"Portals are equal to gates, one thing is on this side, and another is on the opposite side, making them both completely different. The tempters and guardians of the past used them only for great events, since the fires do not just connect the dimensions, they pull them together." The ghost arched an eyebrow, his mind couldn't really grasp the whole implication of such information, but he was still interested. "When pulling the dimensions together, you create a place where they overlap, a place that is both and neither of them. Let's say, you could be walking through the forest at night and find yourself in the cursory levels of hell; or vice-versa. This makes it easier to take and leave stuff, that's why the earthly-ones of yore were so afraid of being kidnapped by demons in the dead of night."
"It's good to know you're interested in history, my champion". The Neutral-one's voice interrupted, getting the ghost's attention.
"I just don't want to be one to screw things up". He assured, mockingly eying the girl beside him that, in her rage, applied more pressure to her hold of the sphere. "What about you, Blue?"
"You insolent-…!"
"Calm yourself, daughter. I can take it from here on" The Neutral-one's voice came with its natural severity.
"Yes, Blue, she can take it from here on". The ghost kept pushing the other's buttons, unsure of why it gave him so much delight to see their unbalanced power dynamic.
"In the meantime, you can go and get the control you lack. You can't let your emotions get the better of yourself, remember how you let your guard down and let Sulfus escape the last time. I would like to talk with our ally in private, anyway". Dan seemed to enjoy Blue's silence as she passed the sphere to her mother's hand before making her way through the fog. However, she stopped in her tracks and dared to talk again:
"Mother, if thou allow me", Blue spoke respectfully while kneeling with her head down. "I too would like to learn more of the plan's details, my insights might be useful to thy vision"
"No". Was Reina's flat answer. "Leave now, you are dismissed"
"But mother-!" The girl tried to rise into a standing position to keep arguing, but was stopped midway when the elder raised her voice:
"I said…!" She paused, trying to remain as calm as possible before continuing in a stern voice: "You are dismissed, child". It took the young woman a lot of effort not to show any kind of facial expression (and to not cry). And yet, she knelt once more and spoke in the same respectful voice as before:
"Thy wish is my will, mother", and made her way to some other place amongst the mysterious foggy labyrinth that was Limbo.
"As you've been told, already, the fires are..."
"Yeah… yeah… things that merge dimensions; that's why I'm hiding them all around Amity. I get it. You need to merge Amity Park and limbo together" The ghost connected the dots. "Now that there's only one more left, can I know what's my part in all of this? What's with the secrecy?"
"Mh… I might as well tell you now, there's nothing they can do anyway."
"They, who?"
"The High Spheres and Low Spheres, they watch everything and everyone, be it on earth, in the highest of Heaven or deepest of Hell. In the most wildest uncharted reaches of the universe, the smallest of the realm of particles, you can be sure they see." She explained. "Certain things can resound beyond planes of existence, my champion". Dan stered, trying to decipher what was that expression on her face as she said that: Wrath? Admiration? Longing? Nostalgia? Hatred? "However, we are in Limbo." Her face reflected a tad of pride and maybe a bit of mania. "This is the only place where 'being' is the same as 'not-being', this is the sweet non-existence. The moment we use the fires to connect Limbo with Earth, we will achieve two things: one, reclaim our right to exist; and two, we'll start a pandemonium", Reina raised a hand and opened a window where a projection of her plan could be seen, "which has been said will spark the beginning of the end."
"Huh… makes sense". The ghost commented, looking unimpressed. "The devils break rules, if one does anything the others will follow suit, and the angels won't have another choice but to try and stop them…"
"And they'll have to break the vito in order to do so; once the wars between them start again, they won't be able to stop. Thus, in order to ensure this…" Reina's eyes met her champion's. "Nothing indicates the young guardian angels, nor their mentors are aware of us, not of your brief appearances in the Earth-ly realm nor the changes around Limbo. Nevertheless, just in case any high-rank angel is just waiting for the moment to stop us… you'll be there"
"So I'm just a back-up plan, huh?"
"Think of yourself as insurance. Besides, you don't have anything to lose. You already have more power than you ever did. You've been able to destroy much of this mighty prison, an unprecedented deed. You can now defy any angelic or devilish warrior and be unphased. You could conquer other planes, if so you wish".
The Phantom didn't speak, he just nodded in recognition of her words. It was true he had no need to have any big titles or be recognized as anything. He could be whoever he wanted by himself. He had the power to do all he wanted. Anything he wanted.
'Most anything, at least'. A small voice seemed to say in the back of his head. His anger was somehow ignited by this.
"Whatever." He finally told the Neutral-one. "Just tell me when's the fight"
"Soon, my champion..." Reina assured him with a tad of madness in her, and the ghost made his way away from her.
"Soon"
...
It was cold.
Was it actually cold at all? No, it wasn't. She was the one feeling cold… Was she tough? Well, that was the only explanation, her hands were shaking and she felt like she couldn't move. Maybe she should try to prepare something hot? The place was already closed, the animals were already back in the shelter, the front doors were locked… What was she forgetting?
"Oh! Right… Inverse metamorphosis!"
After being enveloped by a cocoon of light, the girl's outfit changed, the most interesting part being the pair of slightly glowy white wings on her back and the red strike in her hair.
"Why are you so tense?" She visibly jumped at the sound of the voice taking her away from her thoughts.
"Sul-!" She started but immediately interrupted herself to scold him: "You scared me!". The black-haired boy laughed as the blonde girl gave him a half-hearted punch on the arm. After noticing her pair of wings it took him one second to say:
"Inverse metamorphosys!" And the boy also changed his appearance: his dark hair became longer and messier, a pair of bat-like red wings appeared on his back with a glow similar to that of lava, and a red star tattooed itself over his left eye. He never quite stopped laughing.
She couldn't help thinking how cute he looked when he laughed, especially because, when he did, the star tattooed on his left eye seemed to shine like a real star.
"Sorry, you looked like you needed company" He justified with a sheepish smile that quickly turned into a concerned one. "What's wrong?"
"We're supposed to help Danny..." The long-haired blonde answered. "I just… I'm worried. The last time we saw… her, it was difficult, but we were all higher beings on that occasion…"
"And lower..."
"You know what I mean". She sighed, deeply and went to sit on a turned over crate. "Sulfus, what are we?" The blond girl finally said, trying not to sound as frustrated as she felt. The other seemed surprised.
"What do you mean?" He asked back, visibly confused and a little fearful about the direction this was going to take; and yet, he took another empty crate and used it to sit beside her.
"I'm talking…" She placed her hands on both sides of his face, and then moved them to the upper part of his head, where two broken red horns barely poked out of his messy black hair. "About this… and this" She finished pointing to the space over her head, where the remains of her blue halo resided, now resembling small pieces of floating broken glass barely forming a circle. "We are no longer defined spiritual beings…"
"We still are spiritual beings, my angel… Not the kind we used to be, but…"
"Exactly. We must help Danny, in whatever way we can, but if we have to face Reina directly, and we're hit by her power or a ghost's… If we were still the devil and angel we used to be, we wouldn't have to worry about ghostly attacks, and only mildly about Reina but… We don't know what will happen to us. What if we disappear…?"
"Hey, look at me". He asked, she reluctantly obliged, feeling terrible that now he could see his teary eyes. "It's okay. What's more romantic than fighting alongside the one you love?" He told her with a gentle smile.
"I know, the ancient Greeks encouraged their soldiers to become lovers for the sake of righteous fury, it's just…"
"Shush…" The boy gently placed a finger on the girl's lips. "We don't know for sure what will happen". He finished the sentence with a little doubt in his tone.
"Exactly", she answered. "This is not some of those silly battle scenarios we used to face in the challenge room…"
"We didn't know what could have happened either back then at the Golden School ". He pointed. "We can't do anything right now. It's just the time before the storm. All we can do is try to anticipate…" Raph sighed.
"You're right…" She admitted, more deflated than before.
"You want something to drink?" He suddenly said and started to take ingredients from one of the refrigerators.
"Are you sure this is the right moment to prepare…" She paused to look at what he was preparing. "A… 'Devious Dionysus'? We don't even have the grape juice for it"
"It's fine. I'll improvise with what I have". He assured her as he finished the fruity drink. "Besides, if memory doesn't fail me, the Romans used to say: 'Bibere vivere est', 'Drinking is living'"
"Yes, they did." She answered. "But they said: 'Blessed the Hisánics, for whom drinking is living', and that was a joke because the Hispanics pronounced those words, in latin, the same"
"My point still stands" The devil chuckled as the girl took the beverage from his hands. "Let's enjoy whatever piece we have left before the storm"
...
Danielle walked down the halls of the hospital at the same time she waved at some of the interns she knew, all the way down to the relatively-new investigation wing, where her parents had been working three days a week for the past year.
"Hi Danielle!" One of the scientists assisting in the projects came to her. "What's up?"
"Hi Michelle." She answered the woman with the same familiarity. "I brought my parents something to eat, just in case they forgot to have lunch again".
"Oh, they did." The woman assured her, shrugging and smiling sheepishly the whole time. "The board approved the budget for next year just yesterday and the news spread like wildfire. Seems like we'll have some expensive equipment arriving from Stockholm soon". Danielle arched an eyebrow in amusement and asked a rhetorical:
"They're excited?"
"So excited, they're in the zone. It might take them a few more minutes of waiting for some analysis results to finally realize how hungry they are. Wanna put that in the microwave in the meanwhile?" The woman offered.
"Ok, I'll go get them after-"
"You? Into the lab? Oh, heck no. Half-ghost or not, it's best for you to not go inside. I'll tell someone to pass the message you're here." The scientist declared. Danielle felt like she was in front of an adult version of Jazz. The youngest scientists became friends with her and they seemed to have adopted her as their own little sister —"Don't go in there, don't touch that, you'll hurt yourself". They treated her like a toddler in the lab.
"So, how are things going?" Danielle asked her as they went to the kitchen area and sat by the table, in the hopes that she wouldn't have to endure a long talk and reveal her levels of stress due to the lingering menace that was that alternative Phantom.
"Oh, my Gosh, Dani is here!" She looked in the direction of that voice, thankful for the prospect of Michelle being distracted, and found a woman with fluffy curly hair put back by a headband and another with a bright red flower patterned hijab.
"Hi, Ursula, Hi 'Zette!" Dani greeted her as she came to sit with them. "How's it going?"
"Could be better if Suzette hadn't decided to revive her stand-up routine". She admitted as the tanned girl beside her contained a giggle.
"What? I can't just let all this gold be lost to time, we're Team Joke, after all!"
"Team Joke?" Danielle questioned while Michelle facepalmed with a smile and muttered an almost inaudible: 'God, it's back…'
"What? It's true. Come on, we're totally a living running joke. Are we not Dani?" The girl couldn't respond as the flowered-head spoke afterwards: "See: an asian" she pointed to Michelle, "a latina" she pointed to herself, "and a black girl walk into a lab to work with ectoplasmic-ly preserved organs. The black girl looks at it, sees how everything freezes around the heart and says: 'I wonder who made him so cold hearted', the Asian says: 'maybe it was a cold blood murderer?", then the latina says: 'it's la sección de carnes frías…!'" And her laughter bombed in the small kitchen as the others looked at her, the youngest regretting her straight C+ average in Spanish class, the other two facepalming.
"'Zette, those are only funny for us". Scolded Ursula. "I don't want to think what people will say when you start with religious jokes
"Can't a muslim latina have her fun?" The girl defended herself. "I mean… there's so much untapped potential here!"
"We know, but have a little more respect, it's Dani's brother's organs you're talking about".
"Oh…yeah… Uhm, sorry, Dani…" The girl apologized and visibly deflated a little in shame. "I… that's just something that happened when we came to work the first time and I thought it was really funny-"
"It's ok 'Zette, I'm not mad. Speaking of organs..." The girl left the food containers on the table. "It's been some time, do you mind if I…?" Michelle placed a hand on her shoulder and spoke in a tender voice.
"It's ok, don't worry. Go on". She smiled.
"I'll open the door for you". Suzette offered and took her ID card from her labcoat's pocket.
They walked out of the room and went to a door leading to a currently unused lab (especially designated for doing certain medical tests), somewhere in the back, there was a wall sized glass cabinet, where vital organs coated with a faint layer of blood and ectoplasm floated peacefully inside individual cryogenic tubes that kept their ectoplasm fresh and constant, as they glowed up and down rhythmically around an almost-disturbingly white heart with its veins blue and green. The heart seemed to have frozen ectoplasm around; and yet, it kept beating at a very slow pace.
Dani felt the same cascade of feelings from each time: confusion, sadness, morbid fascination and strange peace. The ghostgirl avoided coming to this place as much as possible, these feelings were not something she wanted. However, this day, she felt like she needed to see them. She was still thinking about her last dream about Danny, and her… vision of him? How could she define what she saw that night at the park? (And that message?) If her brother was still there, she really hoped she could ask him. Actually, it was her need to talk to him that finally made her come to visit (some people visited tombstones, she had this).
More than once she wondered if reassembling his body would bring him back; every organ still worked (with the right change in ectoplasm flow and a small electrical shock, they could be back to full human organs, as if they had just been harvested from a freshly deceased body). Even the brain worked, they used it for studies and practice for difficult surgeries (it healed itself back after being turned into a ghost organ), but it had no sign of real life.
Yeah, this was all just the many layers of Danny, but it was just the "shell" he used as a living person. His spirit was not in there, it was just a bunch of different organs and tissue with ectoplasm.
"What are those?" Danny asked when she noticed a small array of crystal tubes in front of the door.
"Some people signed up for an experimental treatment and we ran out of space for their blood samples in the fridge, so… we stored them here".
"That was smart". Dani admitted. "Actually, this lab seems to be the only one that doesn't need cooling equipement. Must be nice to work here in the summer"
"The downside: this is torture in the winter!" Responded Ursula.
"I still wonder how it works". Suzette pointed out. "When not in ghost form, it is a normal heart. Some ectoplasm and a small shock later? BOOM! It turns into an endless fountain of frost. If it weren't for that automatic alarm making it change every hour, everyone in the hospital would be popsicles".
Dani was also curious about that. The heart was white and oddly translucent, as if it was also made of ice, and yet, it kept beating even in the absence of ectoplasm circulating through it. Of course, Dani knew that was because of Danny's core but, how? She had been theorizing that, since Danny was a halfa his core (and, hence, hers too) wouldn't be like the 'full ghosts' cores —some in the far frozen had described it like an orb, according to other's it was, in fact, very similar to a crystal, they said its shape changed depending on the owner—, maybe, by being technically half-dead, Danny's core kept the form of a normal heart. On the other hand: she couldn't, for the love of God, think of how that worked the time when they pranked Tuck on Halloween —Danny (in full grim reaper costume) in ghost form had ripped his own ghost heart out and placed it on the poor techno-geek's hands with ectoplasm dripping all over (and giving Tuck nightmares for the rest of the week)—. Well, at the moment, she was sure it was because Danny's core wasn't literally one of his organs, but something more… spiritual?
"It's probably something beyond our current understanding" Ursula responded.
"Listen to her". Michelle insisted. "We're simple people. We understand the world based on what we know." Then Suzette continued with a small nog of understandment.
"We've known and registered everything about each of these organs. We know and understand they belonged to a fifteen-year-old young man, we understand they were perfectly healthy, well mostly, and yet we don't know how, or why they stopped working after your brother's accident" Danny got the message, but a certain piece of information seemed to resound in her mind.
"Mostly healthy?"
"Yeah, The ghost cells still carry information about the conditions of the body up until the minute before Danny's… passing. Uhm… the levels of certain hormones indicate signs of a thyroid condition which lead to thyroiditis… which explains some stuff; like his short height and scrawny build, ".
"And we thought Dad's genes had skipped us- I-I mean him".
"And you're probably not wrong, genetics play a humongous role in both determination of thyroid hormone, thyrotropin concentrations, and susceptibility to autoimmune thyroid disease". Danielle looked at her with a puzzled expression (She knew what the thyroid was and did, just not at this level). "Heritability studies have suggested that up to 67% of circulating thyroid hormone is genetically determined"
That made the cogs in her head move in a direction that scared her: the thyroid helped to manage the body's resources for growing up and stuff; and, apparently, its performance was genetic. Maybe that was why she was still underdeveloped (it sounded stupid and irrelevant, but a part of her couldn't help but envy the other girls in PE, since they were not plain as a board like her: the heroine who still had the body of a child when she was supposed to be a teenager). With her luck, she probably was cloned with the same genetic disposition for the thyroid condition instead of an active gene for beautiful, easily bleachable and dyeable, red hair like Jazz's).
"Dani" She heard Maddie calling her and she exited the room while the other girls followed.
"Hi, mom. I was just… visiting". Dani excused herself.
"It's okay, sweetie. We also like to visit once in a while". Maddie said as she hugged her daughter.
"Sometimes we even have lunch here…" Jack added with a smile before correcting himself: "Not inside the lab, obviously. I mean, here by the door." That made Danny giggle.
"Sometimes I like to think that… he's just being a drama queen, you know? And he's having a full on identity crisis somewhere in the Ghost zone or something" Danny joked with a melancholic note and a grin.
"Teenagers and their drama". Jack commented with a grin of his own.
Dani looked intently at the organs inside the glass cabinet: every organ system had been removed completely, she was seeing Danny's body in different layers. Each tube had them floating in ectoplasm, and they were still working despite not being attached neither to a body nor to each other. They were a miracle.
"I wish he knew of the good he's still doing, the impact he's had in the world...". The ghostgirl responded, thinking a little bit about the experimentation and how they all deemed the organs not 'just useful' but 'a treasure for scientific investigation'. Mom had been right: Dany was a hero, post mortem.
"I'm sure he knows". Maddie answered the girl as she kept her arms around her shoulders and Jack's hands were placed on hers and Dani's shoulder.
…
A last message from Yami-Horus: Ugh… this is taking forever, I know, but when the story was NEARLY COMPLEATE, my brain decided to give me more ideas since this fic is essentially a crossover with Angel's Friends md the Angela have not played such a big part up until this point. I hope the story is of your liking, and if it's not… welp, it's my fanfic, I'm enjoying it ;D. Doubts, suggestions, comments, death treats? Leave a review!