Chapter Two: Going Ghost
"You want me to what?" repeats Jazz incredulously. Sitting at her desk with a pencil in hand as she pretends to do her homework (for she's really focused completely on her younger brother, but she's trying hard to convince him that she's not obsessing over him at the moment in the hopes that it'll put him more at ease while he talks to her), the redheaded girl cannot believe the words her younger brother has just uttered.
"I want you to hypnotize me," he states again, glancing at the door. His friends are waiting for him in his room at the moment. He hasn't told them what he has in mind, mostly because Danny knows that Sam and Tucker will not approve of what he's considering; instead, Danny has simply told his friends that he's trying to get Jazz to convince his mom to let him go ghost hunting again. "Please, Jazz? I need to know what happened."
"Danny . . . I'm not really qualified to do something like that," she tells him slowly. "I mean, I've studied hypnosis and read about the techniques, but . . . I'm really just a beginner, and whatever you went through is serious. I could hurt you."
Danny stares at her in shock, amazed that his brainy older sister is sitting there telling him that she is incapable of doing something, that she is not the best at whatever she might happen to set her mind to. He believes, after all, that Jazz thinks she can do anything, that she believes that she is just as good as anyone else and just as smart as any psychologist currently working in the field, but apparently he's misjudged her. Jazz is by far more aware of her limits than he realized, which means that this is just going to be that much harder. "But Jazz, I can't go to a regular therapist," he says, slowly trying to work out some way to convince her to do this, and it comes to him in a flash of inspiration. "I mean, a hypnotist can't see me because they could end up figuring out that I'm Danny Phantom if I said something stupid while I was under."
"I know that, Danny, but you shouldn't even be considering hypnosis," Jazz argues, and now all of her attempts at pretending to be doing her homework are forgotten as she tosses the pencil irritably down onto her desk and looks her younger brother in the eye. "Whatever you experienced was so traumatic that you've repressed several weeks' worth of memories, and if you tried to use some quick method to recover those memories then you could do even more damage to your psyche! I won't be responsible for that. You really just need to go see a real therapist, Danny, and work towards recovering those memories slowly."
"Jazz, I don't want to go to a regular therapist," growls Danny, his frustration increasing. Even if Jazz is nervous about doing it, he was so sure that she would cave just because she wouldn't want to upset him further or make things harder on him. Instead, though, his sister is showing her infamous stubborn side, and Danny just can't focus well enough right now to do anything but uselessly snap back. "You always tell me that therapy's about being honest with yourself or whatever, and I can't be honest with some psychiatrist that I've never even met before and who might sell me off to the GIW or something if they find out what I am!"
"I know that, Danny!" she cries bitterly, completely losing her cool, and then she takes a deep breath as she tries to force herself to stay calm and think things through rationally. After all, that's who Jazz is: logical, calm, the one who works out the solutions to the impossible problems. Yet she's also the one whose emotions tend to blind her when it comes to keeping her baby brother safe, and she knows that letting those emotions cloud her judgment won't help her right now. She needs to offer him something, to bargain with him, but she's just not sure exactly where the middle ground lies, or if she really thinks she can actually help him anymore. "I just don't trust myself to help you anymore after what happened, little brother."
It dawns on Danny, then, what brought on the change in his sister, and the anger leaves him as quickly as it came. "Jazz, you can't seriously be doubting yourself now because of what happened to me. There was nothing you or anyone else could do."
"But you don't know that for sure, Danny, since you don't know what happened anymore than we do," she sighs.
"I know enough to realize that nothing would've happened to me if you'd been there, which means that there probably wasn't anything you could've done differently that day to stop, well, whatever it was that happened. Besides, Jazz, not being able to save me from a ghost or something isn't the same as a therapy session. You're great at this psychology stuff, and for the first time ever, I'm coming in here and actually asking you to use it on me," Danny jokes. "You ought to be jumping at the chance, not fleeing across the state."
Jazz pauses, knowing that he's right. Psychology is her specialty. It's the one thing she's always been able to offer Team Phantom, and this is the first time that her brother's really been willing to take advantage of it. "I just . . . I don't know, Danny . . ."
"If you won't do it, Jazz, then I'm just going to run off and find Desiree and wish to have my memories back or something stupid like that," threatens Danny. "If you think hypnosis will be bad, how awful do you think that'll be? She'll probably twist my wish somehow, too, just to make it worse."
"And you'd still go and see her, even knowing that?" asks Jazz uneasily, and there is no hesitation in Danny's response.
"Yeah, I will. I need to know what happened to me, Jazz. This not knowing is tearing me apart," he whispers, his voice trembling as he stares down at his feet. His fingers are clenching his jeans as he speaks, the tension in his body radiating off him in waves, and it's then that Jazz knows that regardless of how uncomfortable she is with this whole situation, she has to do something to help him. Walking over to her younger brother, she gently puts an arm around him. She intends for the gesture to be supportive and Danny knows this, yet he still flinches automatically when she touches him. "Sorry," he mumbles, almost incoherently.
"It's okay, Danny . . . but if you're willing to go that far, then how about we make a deal?" she suggests quietly, trying not to show her concern over how her brother reacted to her gentle touch. "For three weeks, we'll do this my way. We'll work towards slowly recovering your memories and doing whatever we can in the way that I think is the best for your mental health. If by the end of three weeks we've gotten nowhere, then I'll try to hypnotize you, okay? Even if you want me to do it, I'm still going to need time to learn more about it before I'll even feel a little comfortable trying it on you, because, well, I'm not even sure I'm even comfortable just acting as your therapist without the hypnosis. So three weeks. That's all I'm asking you for, little brother."
Danny closes his eyes as he considers it. Three weeks is a painfully long time from where he stands now, both because it's precisely how much time he's missing and because he knows that he's already falling apart. Yet there is no one else, and Danny knows that seeking the aid of an enemy like Desiree is beyond foolish. As much as he wishes he can convince Jazz to simply try it now, he knows he cannot. His sister might be the only person he knows that is more stubborn than himself or Vlad. "Okay, Jazz. I'll wait, but whether or not we've made real progress with recovering my memories is up to me, not you, got it?"
"I . . . okay, Danny," she agrees reluctantly, for she knows that where a therapist might see signs of progress their patient might not notice at all, but there is no other alternative that she can currently see. At the very least, she's bought herself more time to come up with a better solution to Danny's problem.
"Good. And just one more thing, too . . ." he says slowly, for he doesn't really want to make the next request but knows that he has to for his friends' sake. "If I agree to do things your way for now, then do you think you can convince mom to let me go on patrol tonight?"
For a moment Danny thinks that she'll refuse, but instead his sister smiles at him. "You want to go on patrol?"
"That's normal for me, right?" he asks with a grin, his tone teasing and as light-hearted as he can make it right now. After all, Danny has no desire to go on patrol. Going on patrol means going ghost, and going ghost right now is still so unpleasant, so awful . . . Yet he reminds himself again that he must overcome his anxiety, that he must do so for his friend's sake, if nothing else.
"Okay, Danny. Deal. I'll convince mom. Just make sure that if you have any trouble, you call me, okay?" she pleads.
"Why would I call you? You'll just end up sucking me into the thermos, Jazz," says Danny, and even though he smiles like he's teasing her, there's a harsh, cold edge to his voice that he wishes he could take back. He sees a brief flash of pain in his sister's eyes, his honest words wounding his proud older sister who's already suffering from a severe loss of confidence right now, and he looks down at his feet as he waits for the awful moment to pass.
"Just the same," she says coolly as she walks out the door to go talk to their mom, and sighing heavily at how tactless he can be Danny gets to his own feet to go back to his friends. As he heads to his room, he can hear Tucker and Sam talking to each other. He's tempted to listen in on their conversation, but after hurting one person he cares about, he doesn't want to hurt another by getting angry because he ends up hearing something he might not like about himself from the mouths of his friends. After all, just because Danny knows he's not doing well doesn't mean he wants to hear them discussing it. He wants to believe that his masks are doing the trick, that they're reassuring Sam and Tucker and the others, because if they're not then all of his acting is worse than meaningless.
"Jazz says she'll do it," he declares as he opens the door, and the pair flash him a set of brilliant smiles that make his somewhat dreary room and mood a little brighter. "But in return, I have to let her play the therapist with me."
"You're going to let your sister get inside your head?" states Tucker, and he shudders overdramatically. "Ick, man, that's kind of creepy."
"It's not like I'm going to be telling her my secret fantasies and daydreams, Tuck," Danny replies, shrugging it off, but he's unable to help glancing at Sam, the source and center of many of those secret dreams, before continuing. "She's just going to help me remember what happened."
"Are you sure that you really want to do that, Danny?" Sam asks uneasily. "I mean, whatever happened . . . Lancer's right. It's probably really awful."
"So you heard that part, huh?" smirks the raven-haired boy, and Sam and Tucker exchange guilty looks. "It's okay. I think I need to figure it out so I can move past it, and besides, what if something really important happened? What if I'm not actually forgetting something traumatic but something that's a part of some evil plot that Vlad or someone cooked up and is trying to hide by wiping out my memory?"
"That seems kinda farfetched, dude," says Tucker.
"Is it anymore farfetched than me ending up with ghost powers, or vanishing and then turning up three weeks later with all my memories of that time magically missing from my head?" argues Danny.
"It could be both, too," adds Sam. "Maybe someone did something awful to you and maybe there's also some sort of villainous plot afoot."
Danny and Tucker flash each other matching grins. "Did you seriously just say 'villainous plot afoot?'" snickers Tucker. "I mean, jeez, Sam, what is this, Scooby Doo?"
"I just—ugh—go ahead, laugh it up, Tuck," she grumbles, rolling her eyes as he laughs hysterically at her expense, and even Danny chuckles a little. It strikes him that it's a little morbid to be laughing about something that at heart is actually pretty serious, but he can't help himself, and apparently, neither can Tucker. "But come on, haven't either of you two realized that our lives more closely resemble a weird cartoon at times?"
Although Tucker keeps on chuckling, Danny's laughter quickly dies with Sam's words. "You really believe that?" he asks, for although he admits that his life has had some similarity to a bad superhero comic or tv show, the bruises, the scrapes, the cuts, the sleepless nights, the disappointed looks on his parents' faces, not to mention the horrific nightmares that he has when he does sleep . . . It's a reality that's always been harshly tangible for Danny, even as that reality has apparently been lost on his friends. Then again, Danny knows that's at least partly his fault. He's been protecting them from the worst of it for a long time. Every time he shrugs off an injury that leaves him feeling crippled for days, his friends just assume that he's invincible. Every close fight he has, every near loss that he waves away as if it was nothing makes his friends look upon at him like he's the ultimate superhuman, when the truth is that he's just not superhuman enough. And while it's true that Danny is made of stronger stuff than the average human, at the end of the day, he really is nothing more than a scared teenage boy buried beneath all that armor.
"Sometimes," she admits, not sure why Danny's upset about it, but he's saved from her questions by a knock on the door.
"Come in," he calls, assuming it's his mom and Jazz, and sure enough, the two red heads walk into the room, his mother standing there in her blue jumpsuit. She looks a bit troubled, and there's that uncertain, nervous look in her eyes as she stares at her son that Danny's become all too familiar with. Danny can't help but wonder if it will ever leave his mother's eyes.
"Sweetie," she begins, and the endearment sounds strained, as if it's still hard for her to look upon her half-ghost son with the same love she felt for him before, "your sister said that you wanted to go on patrol tonight."
"Um . . . yeah," he says slowly, and he's practically begging her with his eyes to say no. If she tells him he can't go, then that's that. He won't have to go ghost. He won't have to feel that awful, horrible, sickly sensation . . .
"I don't think you should go tonight," she begins, and Danny resists the urge to let out the breath that he started holding when she first came into his room. "I . . . Your father and I think that we should have you run through a couple of tests first."
"Tests?" he squeaks, for the mere thought of being tested by his parents terrifies him. It's simply too close to his nightmares about being captured by them and experimented on or vivisected, of being trapped beneath a knife in his mother's hand while she cuts him open no matter how much he screams and cries that he's her son and begs her to stop. Although he knows he shouldn't be so scared, he can't keep his voice from trembling as he asks, "What kinds of tests?"
"They're worried about what happened to you, Danny," explains Jazz, who is well aware of her brother's old nightmare. "Whatever you went through may have affected your ghost powers, and they just want to make sure that they work okay before you go out and put yourself in danger like that."
So she still wants me to go ghost, he thinks, his stomach clenching. It's the last thing that he wants, but he tells himself once again that it's his duty and that he must do it, and that's all of the self-encouragement he needs. "Do you just want me to run through the obstacle course we set up in the lab?" Danny asks.
"You set up a course?"
"Yeah," he replies, looking to Sam and Tucker for support. Not for the first time Danny feels fortunate to have two extremely loyal friends sitting by his side. "We figured it was a good way to track the development of my powers and for me to get in some more practice."
"So you have records of your test results, then?" she asks curiously, the scientist in her clearly coming to the surface, and Danny nods. "That could provide a good baseline depending on how controlled the course is and how well your friends kept records."
"We're pretty good at it, Mrs. Fenton," chimes Tucker. "I mean, no offense to Danny, but Sam and I are the smart ones in this trio."
"Hey! It's not my fault that I don't have time to study!" he grumbles, forcing himself to smile and take back on the weight of that damn mask, but he's already so tired. It's only been a day, yet Danny can barely handle it anymore. He wonders how he ever used to be able to bear its weight before his disappearance, and how much longer it'll be before that fragile mask slips and tumbles to the ground, only to smash to pieces with no hope of ever being put back together again.
"No amount of studying would stop you from being so clueless, though," adds Sam. "Trust me, Mrs. Fenton. Tucker's right. Our results are good, or at least, they're good enough for you to figure out if Danny's powers are working okay or not. Come to think of it, I haven't actually seen him use any all day."
"I was trying to be normal, remember?" he says, for he doesn't want them to know the truth, and even though he doesn't want to, he makes his right hand invisible. "There? Happy?"
His mother gasps, still not accustomed to seeing displays of her son's power, but his friends and Jazz seem relatively unfazed and unconvinced. Each one seems to suspect that he's hiding something, but not one is sure just what that is. The feeling of his hand being invisible like that makes Danny feel deeply uneasy, and for some reason, the song that's been stuck in his head all day long seems to grow louder with the display. Before he loses touch, Danny brings his hand back into the visible spectrum, only then allowing himself to look at his mother's face again. He can't bear to look in her eyes when he uses his powers—there's never anything there except for fear, guilt, and pain.
Just once he wishes he could see the pride and acceptance he'd always hoped would be there before they learned the truth and reality proved otherwise.
"Are . . . Are you sure you're okay with doing this, Danny?" asks Jazz quietly. "It's fine if you're not. You shouldn't feel like you have to go on patrol or anything. The other ghost hunters in town can handle it."
"I'm sure, Jazz," he lies, pushing past his mother and his sister to the hallway, and he glances back impatiently. "Come on. I'll show you the course and run through it for you. Sam and Tucker can record my results and show you the files where we've been keeping records on everything."
Without actually waiting to see if they'll follow, he heads down towards the lab, and sure enough his friends and family aren't far behind. While they walk behind him, he lets his face relax at last, lets himself lose touch for just a moment. It's both a relief and a burden, for he knows that every time he puts down the mask it just gets harder to put back on, but he needs these moments, these brief instances where he simply lets himself be, and absentmindedly he finds himself almost inaudibly humming the first part of the song. Maybe this time if he hums the entire song then he'll stop hearing it, but he doubts it. He's tried it before when he can't sleep at night, yet the song is still there, echoing in his head.
As he comes to the top of the stairs to the lab, he feels a twinge of unease, but that's nothing new. Although he pretends otherwise, the lab has made him nervous ever since his accident, for Danny knows how easily the accident that made him a half-ghost could have killed him instead that day. It's also the place that reminds him constantly of how different he is, of his strange existence as a not quite dead, not quite living being, and of how the only other person who might be able to understand what such an existence is like is hell-bent on destroying his father and marrying his mother.
His footsteps echo softly on the laboratory stairs as the green glow of the portal comes into sight, and his father's bright-orange haz-mat suit clashes horribly against it as he stands in front of the doors, frowning, before slamming them back into place just by touching the tiny DNA scanner beside it. "Is something wrong?" wonders Danny as he enters the lab, and his father, glancing up at him, forces a smile onto his face as he responds.
"No, no, Danny-boy, the portal's working fine, but it does seem to be giving off a 0.0005 percent increase in power over the last hour," his father explains. "I was checking the power levels with the doors opened, too, to see if the readings were any different. Did you need something, son?"
"He wants to go on patrol tonight, Jack," explains Maddie as she enters, and the fake smile fades from his face as he regards his son with something akin to disbelief.
"Patrol?" he repeats as the others enter the lab. "But we haven't checked out his ghost half yet, and—"
"—I know, dear," she interrupts, "and I told him that. He insisted that we come downstairs and run some obstacle course that he and his friends set up in the lab as a way to test him."
I don't remember insisting we do anything like that, thinks Danny, scowling faintly. He much rather would have preferred hiding in his room and pretending to do homework to going ghost, but all of his attempts to weasel out of his earlier promise have failed spectacularly and he doesn't have the energy to try putting it off any longer.
"You guys set up a training course?" exclaims Jack, his eyes full of childlike glee. "I can't believe we never noticed it before!"
"We worked really hard to hide it," explains Sam as she moves over to a dusty desk and grabs a hidden control out from beneath it. "Tucker's the one who did the wiring for it, and Danny and I just built the rest."
"That's actually rather impressive," compliments Maddie as Sam presses a button and parts of the course emerge from the walls. "Are you ready, Danny?"
"No," he mumbles, only realizing that he said it aloud when he sees them staring at him, and rubbing the back of his neck he rapidly spits out the first excuse he can think of. "I mean, I have to transform first . . . I just wanted to warn you guys so you wouldn't, you know, get too freaked out or anything."
Maddie smiles gently at him. "It's okay, sweetie. Whenever you're ready."
"Guys?" he asks, glancing at his friends, but the two of them are already prepared. Tucker holds his PDA in hand, while Sam stands ready with the radar gun in one hand and the control in the other. Taking a deep breath, Danny closes his eyes and lets the rings wash over him. Although he hopes that maybe this time it won't be so bad, it's still almost as awful as it was when he last tried to go ghost several days ago. The pain in his chest is still there, ever present, as if his heart and lungs are now made of lead, and there's a dark, unpleasant feeling that seems to ripple through him every time one of his friends or family members looks at him. Chancing a glance at his mom and dad, Danny wants to cry when he notices that although his parents are looking at him with smiles on their faces, the expressions are no more genuine than most of the ones that Danny has worn today. They're still uneasy. Afraid. Guilt-ridden.
But just like his parents, Danny is doing his best to mask his feelings, too, and so he flashes them an equally, insincere smile. "Ready when you guys are, Sam."
"Ready . . . Go!" she exclaims, and Danny runs through the course as best he can, for he expects to stumble and fail at every turn. To his shock, however, he finds that most of it isn't so bad. The course occupies every inch of his mind, even that part which feels so heavy right now, and using his powers to blast away fake targets feels cathartic somehow. He feels as if he's back to himself and living the life he had before he vanished. Fighting ghosts and defending the town was such a central part to his being that Danny begins to think that going on patrol might actually be a brilliant idea.
The moment the course is over, however, Danny notices that the pain has returned, as has the nearly overwhelming haze and chills. "You haven't been using your ice powers much, have you?" asks Sam, noticing a tremor run through him, but Danny knows that's not it. These chills are something else entirely—they're goose bumps, and an old saying about how having a sudden, inexplicable chill is akin to someone walking over his grave almost makes Danny chuckle. Someone is definitely walking over his grave, all right, for if the lab isn't the closest thing to a tomb he has, then what is?
"Probably not," he lies. He doesn't want to worry her. "I just need to go out and kick a little ghost butt on a daily basis again and I'll be fine."
"Well, you're doing pretty well, although you seem a little slower and stiffer than usual," comments Jazz as she looks over at the readings.
"I'm just out of practice," Danny says, waving it off as he shifts back into his human form, and the sudden light makes his parents flinch. They're still not used to it, but it's okay. His friends weren't at first either, and Danny tells himself that eventually his parents will be. They have to be, after all, since they are his family, and right now Danny's just dealing with too much to believe otherwise. "A couple of fights and I'll be back to normal in no time."
Hopefully, he adds mentally, for although he pretends to be sure, he's not half as optimistic as he sounds. "I'm still not sure I want to let you go, sweetie," his mother sighs. "I'm just . . . what if something happens again?"
"I'll be careful," he promises, "and if you and dad want, you can come along and watch my back." He knows that offering to let them join him will only serve to reassure his parents—his father's aim is so awful and his hunting skills so lamentable that only Jazz might be worse, to the point where having his dad watch his back might be more dangerous than any ghost fight. "And Sam and Tucker will be there, too."
"But—"
"—mom, I'm not saying I'm going to go run off and fight a ghost on my own," says Danny quickly. "I know that something like that is probably what got me into this whole mess in the first place. Until I get my memories back, I won't fight ghosts except on patrols, and I won't go on patrols without someone with me."
"He'll be fine, Mrs. Fenton," assures Sam. "We've done this loads of times, and we know that nothing happened to Danny while we were with him. Whatever it was, someone clearly wanted to keep it a secret and caught him when he was out alone."
"You think someone erased his memories on purpose?" his dad asks curiously. "But who the heck would be strong enough to do something like that?"
"It's not necessarily someone strong, Mr. Fenton," Tucker explains. "I mean, even a ghost as pathetic as Desiree could if someone just made the right wish."
Danny's eyes light up at Tucker's explanation, for he hasn't even considered the wishing ghost or his other more pathetic enemies as the potential cause behind his memory loss. He just assumes that it was something trauma induced, since that's what his sister and friends are thinking as well, but maybe his other instinct is right. Maybe one of his enemies did mess with his head. "We should go look for her, Tuck," says Danny, briefly forgetting that his parents are there and that neither one will agree to let their son run head first into trouble. "Because if you're right and she's responsible for this, then she'll have to tell me that if I wish for her to tell me the truth!"
"That sounds like a horrible idea," Sam says even before either of his parents can argue against it. "Desiree will just twist whatever you wish for into something that'll suit her own purposes, Danny. Maybe she'll tell you the truth about having your memories erased but lie about who did it or something."
"And I don't think that's why you have no memories, Danny," Jazz adds softly, putting a hand on his shoulder.
"But maybe—"
"—I don't think that's it either, dude," interrupts Tucker. "Remember when Sam wiped your memories of the two of you meeting each other because of that screwed up wish with Desiree? You two were literally strangers—there was nothing there, no feeling, and nothing to remind you of all the times we'd shared together, but this time . . . you were pretty messed up afterward, and, well . . ."
"What?"
"No matter how hard you try to hide it, we can tell that something about it keeps nagging you," says Sam reluctantly. "I mean, you seemed okay today—" Danny fights down the relief that almost floods his expression, then, for if she actually believes he was okay today then that means his masks are working for them "—but up until now you've been kind of a wreck."
"And going after some ghost like that could be dangerous, Danny," his mother adds, finally managing to say what she's wanted to since the moment he proposed the idea. "Your powers might seem to be working okay right now, but there's no guarantee that they won't malfunction in an actual fight. So try patrolling tomorrow first and just make sure you can get through that. Please, Danny? I know you're impatient, but don't rush things."
Closing his eyes, Danny lets out a slow breath. "Yeah, I know. I guess it just would've made this whole thing easier if someone had brainwashed me," he grumbles sarcastically, and then he looks down at his feet as he speaks one of the most honest things he will have said all day. "I just wish I knew what happened to me."
"It's okay, Danny," says Jazz gently, throwing an arm around him as she guides him back up the stairs, and for the first time Danny manages not to flinch when someone touches him even though a part of him still desperately wants to fling her arm away. "We'll figure it out. I promise."
A/N: First things first: thanks for all of the reviews! I know I responded to most of them, but there were a couple of people who I couldn't answer so for those of you who never got a response from me, I just wanted to let you know that I appreciated it a lot.
As far as the story itself, I felt that this chapter was a little bit slow, at least in my opinion, but it was kind of necessary, so I'm not going to apologize for it very much (at all) . . . At any rate, I promise that it picks up in the next chapter. I actually already have most of Chapter Three done and edited, so I'm tempted to update a bit earlier than usual, but I'm almost worried that I might've hit the ground running a little too fast in that one and thrown the pacing completely out of whack, so hmm . . . I guess I'll have to think on it a bit more. I actually struggled a lot with that whole dialogue between Jazz and Danny in the beginning of this chapter, too, which is frustrating for me since dialogue's the one part that usually comes naturally to me when I write (the details in between? Much less so). I'm still not entirely thrilled with it, but I'm not going to make myself any crazier trying to fix it right now. Maybe eventually, but . . . yeah. Not today.
Naturally, I'm curious as to whether or not anyone has any guesses about what happened to Danny yet, so if you review, I'd love it if you'd tell me what you're thinking and whether or not the answer to the mystery is as obvious as I think it's become. Of course, I know where it's going, so I may just have the hindsight thing working for me right now as I go through this, and to be fair, I probably won't tell you if you're right or wrong. . . but still. I'd love to hear your guesses.
Any other general comments/critiques (positive, negative, or otherwise) that you guys have are definitely welcome, of course, so if you have the time, then please leave a review. Even short reviews with a quick "That was great!" are enough to inspire me to write a little faster and try a little harder every time, so I'd really appreciate it.
Until next time! :)