48. Childhood

"Jazz move over, I can't see."

"Stop pushing me, Danny!"

A huff and an indignant yelp. Maddie rolled her eyes, put down her book – 'Ghosts And Their Habitats' – and got up from the couch she had been sitting on comfortably, trying to read. The noise of her children's squibbing increased, almost completely drowning the clanking sounds coming from the basement. Jack, working on his newest idea, a new way to open a portal to the ghost zone. Maddie had tried to dampen his enthusiasm, to no avail. He was sure it would work. She was slightly skeptical, realizing almost immediately the staggering amount of work it was going to need. She knew things never held Jack's interest for too long, and if it were left to him, the thing would never get past the first roughly sketched draft and maybe the portal entrance Jack was now so vigilantly working on.

Still, a portal to the ghost zone... Standing there, her book and children forgotten, she stared at the stairs leading down to the basement. It couldn't hurt starting some of the calculations, running some simulations, maybe write a specialized program that might contain the plasma within the portal instead of bursting out... they had done it before, after all, with the proto portal.

Her mouth twitched, remembering the accident it had caused, Vlad's illness, the ensuing estrangement... he hadn't even shown up at their wedding, which had pained her more than she cared to admit. But that was all in the past now, it had been ten... no, twelve years. Maybe it was time to start anew. And then Jack's idea of using an ecto filter...

A scream brought her back to the present, and she looked up, just in time to see Danny push his sister away from the cage that contained the guinea pig of their new next door neighbor's daughter. They were on vacation, and Jazz and Danny had enthusiastically offered to look after the pet in the week they would be gone. Maddie looked at the scene and frowned, already regretting her 'yes, of course Sabina can stay with us' as she viewed her ten year old daughter laying on her back, crying, and her eight year old son, squatting in front of the cage, blocking his sister from view.

"Kids," she said, "If you can't share, then the both of you can go upstairs to your room and do something separate for a while. Danny, move over, it's a big cage. Jazz, stop bossing your brother around."

She stepped over her daughter, ignoring the girl's loud but obviously fake sobs, and continued down the stairs to the basement. Halfway down, her children's quarrel was already forgotten, formulas started to form in her head. She needed to write them down quickly, or they would be lost.

As soon as her mother had left the room, Jazz stopped crying. She remained on the floor, though, glaring at her little brother, who was trying to get a glimpse of the shy little creature, hiding under a pile of hay.

"You're scaring it," she said.

"Am not," Danny said, half turning to glare at her.

He turned back and studied the cage, then stuck his finger between the bars.

"Come on, boy, come on out. Let us see you?"

"It's a she."

Danny blinked. "What?"

"It's a she. Her name is Sabina. That's a girls name," Jazz said in her usual know-it-all way. "Move over. You're scaring her."

Now slightly intimidated by the fact that he had mistaken the creature's gender, Danny moved aside to let his big sister handle the coaxing the guinea pig out from its hiding place. Jazz moved up next to him and sat down on her knees, bending forward a little.

"Hello, Sabina, my name is Jazz. Come on out, we're not going to hurt you. Come on, kitty."

"She's a guinea pig, not a kitten."

Jazz turned to her brother. "And she can't understand a word I say anyway. What does it matter if I call her kitty?"

"Just saying."

The guinea pig in the cage moved. Two heads shot back into position, four eyes staring intently at the pile of hay in the middle of the cage.

"It's a haystack," Danny snickered.

"Maybe we need a carrot?" Jazz mused, rubbing her nose. The hay made her nose feel ticklish.

"It's not a rabbit, Jazz."

"Guinea pigs eat carrots too."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I'm older than you!"

"You don't know anything!"

Brother and sister now glared at each other, ignoring the moving haystack in the cage. The clanking sounds from the basement had subsided, leaving an eerie silence that normally had the siblings diving for cover, used to their parents' sometimes dangerous experiments. A truck drove by. The silence intensified. Unnoticed by the children next to the cage, the guinea pig stuck out its pink nose from under the hay.

"JACK! NO! NOT THE..."

Their mother's yell had both Jazz and Danny moving, instantly reacting to the familiar speech pattern. Jazz pushed Danny behind the couch, and kept pushing him until she herself fit behind it as well, the both of them letting out a stream of expletives that should not have been in their vocabulary. Then Jazz turned around, horror struck.

"Sabina!" she yelled.

Just as she was about to crawl back from behind the couch, the basement exploded. A bright green flash and a cloud of black smoke, tinged with green, came out from the basement, instantly covering the entire living room in black, sticky soot. Coughing, the children covered their heads with their hands and tried to remain low to the ground.

"Jazz? Danny? Are you OK?"

Danny looked up, then nudged his sister. "Yeah, mom, we're here," he said.

"Where's dad?" Jazz asked as she straightened, trying to see through the smoke.

"He's fine," their mother's voice sounded through the smoke.

A few moments passed, then a loud whirring sound indicated that Maddie Fenton had turned the ventilation to maximum. The smoke started to recede. Danny and Jazz stood up and surveyed the now completely black room. On the other side, their mother busied herself with opening windows.

"You kids weren't hit directly with that, were you?" she asked.

"No mom," Danny said, eyes wandering through the room, and then settling on the blackened cage of the guinea pig. It had been standing directly in the blast's path.

Slowly, he stepped up to the cage and squatted before it.

"Hey?" he said, "Sabina? Are you still there?"

The haystack moved. Danny sighed in relief. It would be a little hard to explain to their new friend that her pet had died in one of his parents' experiments. He already had a hard time keeping friends. Not making friends, making friends was easy. But usually only one visit to his house was enough to chase them away. Naturally, both Jazz and Danny had been delighted when a family had moved in next door, oblivious to the Fenton's strange household.

"Is she alright?" Jazz asked, trying to wipe some of the black soot from her hair.

"Yeah," Danny said, half turning to smile at her, "She's still there."

He turned back and studied the haystack intently. It moved again a little, but something was off. A small nose stuck out from under it, sniffing.

"Uh," Danny said, "Jazz?"

"Yeah?" Jazz asked, looking cross-eyed at her long, no longer red strands of hair, holding it up to inspect the damage.

"Is Sabina supposed to be green?"


LOL. Had a guest a few weeks back and I was terrified I'd somehow kill the small animal. And yes, her name was (and still is, fortunately) Sabina.