I know, I know, it's been an aeon and a half since I updated. It's been a combination of work keeping me busy, family stuff going on, and just the fact that I naturally tend toward laziness. But, hey, better late then never right? So here's something to sate your appetites for now. Thank you for the continued support! Every favorite, follow, and comment increases my power, and soon I will be cutting quite the imposing figure.

"So, I'm trying to figure it out," Tucker said. "Are those online articles overselling this Stanford Pines, or are you just underselling him?"

"You can't wait ten more minutes to find out?" Danny asked.

"Nope." Tucker bounced a little on the soles of his feet in impatience as he, Danny, and Sam walked along the sidewalk, halfway through their trek on the way to Danny's house. "I have to fixate on something, you know, or I'm gonna die of boredom. Why do you have to live so far from school?"

"Oh, don't complain," Danny said, rolling his eyes. "It's not my fault Jazz is all about those 'extra-curriculars'. Can't get a ride from her every day."

"What club does she have today, anyhow?" Sam asked.

Danny shrugged. "I dunno, debate team? Key Club? Overachievers anonymous? I can't keep track."

"Don't suppose there's any chance you could fly us the rest of the way?" Tucker whined.

"You want me to go flying toward home in ghost form, right toward a scientist who may or may not actually be a perfectly competent ghost hunter? No thanks."

"It's not that much farther, Tucker," Sam said. "Honestly, is walking in the school hallways the only exercise you ever get?"

"Even that's too much," Tucker replied.

Danny shoved Tucker by the shoulder. "Hey, how about, if you go the rest of the walk without complaining about walking, I sneak you some of my dad's secret-stash fudge, okay?"

"Hmm. Kinda hate to give up the complaining, but I also like that fudge. All right, deal. New topic?"

"Actually," Sam said, "How about we just enjoy some rare peace and quiet during our walk?"

Tucker gave her an exaggerated eye roll, but complied. Danny wasn't being such a great conversational partner at the moment anyway, and he knew it. He was still, admittedly, distracted by the thoughts on the Pines family that had occupied his mind all day, too much so to give his usual courtesy laughs to Tucker's bad jokes.

Fortunately, they only had a couple of minutes left to walk in silence before they arrived at FentonWorks – Danny noticing when they did that the El Diablo was in the driveway again, which meant Ford was here – and traipsed into the house, dropping their backpacks by the door and moving into the kitchen. Danny climbed up onto the counter to reach the top of one of the overhead cabinets and retrieved the tupperware container that held Jack's secret stash of fudge, and gave Tucker a piece as promised.

A soft industrial hum coming from the basement told them that the Fentons and Ford were hard at work in the floor below, and Danny motioned Sam and Tucker to follow him. "All right," he said. "You guys ready?"

"Finally we meet the famous Ford!" Tucker cheered, grinning through a mouthful of fudge.

"You might want to chew and swallow before we go down there, Tucker," Sam said, wrinkling her nose. "Right now your mouth isn't exactly a stellar example of a good first impression."

"By the way," Danny added as he opened the basement door and started leading them downstairs, keeping his voice softer now, "When you meet him, don't stare at his fingers."

"Why would we stare at his – ?" Tucker began, but he was cut off when Jack spotted the group on the stairs, and waved heartily at them before bouncing over with a broad grin.

As soon as he had reached them, he was gripping Sam and Tucker by a wrist each, tugging them into the lab proper. "Ah, Tucker! Sam! I don't suppose Danny brought you down here to meet the famous Stanford Pines, did he?"

"Wait just a moment, Jack," piped up Ford's voice from across the lab. He and Maddie were at one of the metal lab tables, bent over a container whose contents Danny couldn't see. Whatever it was, though, it definitely had the scientists' attention. Ford had some small tool in his hand and appeared to be in the middle of a miniaturized operation, while Maddie was looking on. The goggles of her haz-mat suit made it nigh impossible to see her eyes, but judging by the way she was remaining perfectly still as she stood enraptured by the procedure, Danny suspected that they weren't even blinking.

Jack waited for a moment while Ford finished up whatever he was doing. After about a minute of patient silence, Ford straightened up, removing his rubber gloves – custom-made ones, probably, not the disposable sort that Jack and Maddie preferred – and pulling the large, clear goggles off from wear they had sat over his glasses. "We'll monitor the effects over the next few days," he told Maddie. "See if the rate of deterioration has increased to a statistically significant level. We should probably be sampling a culture from the site of injection every few hours at least. Now then, how can I help you?" He finally turned toward Jack and the kids.

Jack nudged Sam and Tucker forward. "Couple of other little scientists for you to meet. This is Sam and Tucker. They're friends of Danny's, and they're around a lot, so you'll probably be seeing plenty of them. Did Danny tell you guys much about Stanford?"

"Nah, just mentioned him in passing," Sam replied with a perfectly straight face.

"Well," Jack said, beaming up at the older scientist, "All you need to know is that with him around, you're probably going to get to see some huge advances in ghost-hunting coming out of Fentonworks very soon."

"Nice to meet you Sam, Tucker," Ford said, not even acknowledging Jack's rambling. Danny was impressed. The man had been here for two days and was already completely enured to Jack's overbearing personality. Ford shook Sam and Tucker's hand, and naturally, Tucker stared fixatedly at it the whole time, eyes widening when he shook it. In retrospect, Danny realized that maybe telling him not to look at something was probably a great way to guarantee he would do just that. Fortunately, Ford either didn't notice or chose not to acknowledge it.

Sam did a better job of maintaining decorum, looking Ford in the eyes when she shook his hand. "So, what are you working on with the Fentons?"

"At the moment, we're mostly trying to see if we can get Mikhail Lomonosov to roll over in his grave," Ford answered, grinning.

"… What?"

Maddie, still standing over by the lab table, let out a laugh. "More specifically, we're attempting to defy the law of conservation of matter. An ambitious undertaking, sure, but Stanford has actually been looking into this project for a while now."

"Really it ties into overall transdimensional physics," Ford said. "The very concept of matter actual differs from dimension to dimension, so, should we be working with matter from another realm, there's no reason it needs to adhere to our dimension's laws of physics."

"Ultimately, if we can make any sort of real strides in the topic, the effects on ghost-hunting would be absolutely staggering," Maddie explained. "It wouldn't even be a matter of just destroying a ghost."

"Ripping it apart molecule by molecule," Jack interjected.

"It would be actually erasing every physical trace of it from existence."

"Oh. Huh. Wow." Danny hoped to high heaven that he wasn't showing any outward signs of his feelings on the matter on his face. Sam and Tucker were sneaking worried glances toward him, but he didn't know if that was because his expression had changed at all, or they were simply granting him some understandable sympathy. "So, um, that's what you're working on over there?"

Ford nodded. "Maddie acquired a ghost sample for me to run a couple of test ideas on. A couple of the formulae your parents have here for your weapons could probably be repurposed into working toward the matter erasure we're aiming for."

"You – you have a ghost sample?"

"Not one of the better ones," Maddie answered. She picked up the container on the lab table and tilted it so that Danny could finally see what they'd been working with, displayed through a transparent lid on the container. Danny was relieved to see that the sample was just a small ectopus.

Although, just because that was all they were experimenting on for now didn't mean they'd try it on bigger targets in the future…

"So, what exactly is the point of this?" Tucker piped up, his voice shaking Danny out of his thoughts. "Is it really necessary, I mean? There are already plenty of weapons and stuff available to get rid of ghosts."

"Not entirely, there aren't," Ford said. "Remember, ghosts as we know don't live in the sense that we usually accept as life and sentience. They are denizens of a soulscape interacting with a dimension of physical form. So when people from our dimension fight ghosts, even supposedly 'kill ghosts' they are not so much actually destroying it as they are reconfiguring their matter into another planar state. And if the knowledge we have of the structure of the ghost zone and its dimensional makeup is correct, I'd say that many ghosts are in a state where they essentially took a wrong turn to the dimension most think of as the afterlife. But in that process, they take on a soulscape form, and become anchored to this ghost dimension. They likely can never really progress to another dimensional state from there. Or, I suppose, theoretically, it's still possible, but current available information on transdimensional leaps actually suggest that – "

"The bottom line being," Maddie interrupted, "The ghosts of the ghost zone are basically in a state when they can never truly 'die'. They can shift dimensional form, they way humans do when they move on to the afterlife, but because of the way they restructured in the ghost zone dimension, they'll never really be at peace. That probably is at least part of the reason ghosts are so naturally prone to anger and chaos."

Sam had her brow deeply furrowed as she listened to the explanation, and slowly she asked, "And so, this is the solution? If they can't die the way you want them to, you'll just… erase them?"

"I understand how it sounds," Ford said. "But really, it's the kinder option. Without a real end to a ghost's existence, it will just continue to shift toward destruction and rage until those are all that's left. If that is going to be a by-product of immortality, then non-existence is the preferable option."

Danny was starting to feel dizzy. He hadn't been expecting to be forced into a philosophical crisis when he came home from school today, and it was about a dozen times more painful then anything he'd ever be able to pull off with a shotput ball. Hoping to avoid having to think about Ford's experiments any further, he took Sam's wrist and gently starting tugging her back toward the stairs. "Well, uh, this – this is fascinating stuff, it really is. I should probably let you get back to work. Maybe see if Dipper or Mabel need homework help or something."

"They're not here today," Ford said. "Their uncle Stan took them out to a movie. One of those superhero ones. Can't recall which; they just make so many of them nowadays, don't they?"

"Their – wait, I thought you were their uncle Stan."

"I meant my brother, Stanley. We're both their legal guardians."

"Stanford and Stanley?" Tucker laughed. "Seriously?"

Ford offered him a shrug. "My father was not the most creative man. Now, I don't want to keep you, so you three go on. If you're interested in anything else we're doing in here, though, feel free to come down." He bobbed his head in salutation and turned around, heading back to the table, sliding a lab notebook open and pulling a pen from his pocket. "By the way, Danny," he added. "Thank you for spending time with Dipper and Mabel yesterday."

"Oh. Right, no problem."

"Really, I do appreciate it. They seemed to like you well enough. Dipper especially seemed quite intrigued by you."

Danny paused in his slow backward walk to the stairs. "He was?"

Ford nodded. "He was asking a lot of questions about you last night. Wanted to know what we talked about when we met, what Jack and Maddie told me about you, what my impression was."

"Aw, isn't that sweet?" Maddie said, beaming at Danny. "Danny's got himself a little fan."

Ford chuckled. "You honestly should be flattered. Dipper doesn't often want to get to know someone that well unless they've really piqued his interest in some way. So, whatever you guys did together, it worked. Mabel seemed pretty interested in you as well, but, full disclosure, she's that way with pretty much every new boy she meets. Don't tell her I told you that, though," he added with a grin.

Danny forced out a laugh. "Yeah, uh, we – I guess we bonded a bit. That's – that's great. That's wonderful. We've really got to go now, homework and all that."

"I'll tell Dipper you said hi," Ford called after him as Danny turned tail and ran up the basement stairs two at a time, Tucker and Sam following close behind.