BVQA: Well, people, that was fun!

Dani: Help! She's impersonating me!

BVQA: Shush. Some of us are enjoying this.

Dani: I hope you get arrested, you twisted fiend! You didn't even have the decency to include a disclaimer!

BVQA: I know. As of now, I no longer do disclaimers for this story. I'm just going to wait until I get arrested and they throw me in a padded cell. Then I can meet all the other crazy people!

There were miles and miles of red tape. In her darker moods, Dani thought that if she flew for her whole existence she would never get to the end of it. It turned out that, legally, she was an enigma inside of a conundrum. She had long, long hours of people telling her just that.

First of all, she didn't exist. Well, she did, but legally she didn't, and that's all the courtroom cared about. She had no birth certificate, no medical forms, no nothing. Apparently, the fact that she was standing in the same room as the knucklehead lawyers wasn't enough for them to accept that she was real. What did she have to do, stand on her head? Roll over? Go ghost?

Actually, the half-ghost bit was complicating matters too. The government was still goofing off with the mountain of paperwork that allowed ghosts to still be related to living families, and Dani was neither alive or dead. In her humble opinion, that meant she should be exempt from all laws and have her own set of rules, but apparently no one shared her view.

Another annoying thing: Vlad was trying to gain custody of her. Dani would actually rather kill herself than live with the fruitloop, something she was planning on saying in a loud tone of voice at the court that afternoon. Whether or not that would get her locked up in a padded cell somewhere where they put suicide attempters remained to be seen.

Yet another annoying thing: Vlad was completely off the hook for child abuse simply because Dani did not fully qualify as a child. The clone thing was coming back to bite her, especially since her genetics were just the slightest bit different from Danny's. The court had yet to come up with laws about clones (of corse) and Dani was definitely a far cry from what they'd been expecting. According to them, any clone would be considered the child of the genetic original. Sadly, Danny was not old enough to be her father (or sad to them anyway), and Dani was not young enough to be his child (although technically she'd only existed for a few months). Danny also couldn't show up in court or he'd probably be thrown in jail for all the bank robberies he hadn't exactly committed. Apparently, the closest thing you could plead to 'an evil madman was controlling me with his magic staff' was 'temporary insanity'. That wasn't quite good enough.

Dani was brought back to the present by the bickering of Sam and Tucker. They were the ones the Fentons had chosen to act as joint lawyers, Sam because of her extensive knowledge of ecto-law and Tucker for his amazing tech skills. Everyone was absolutely certain that together, they could and would bring Dani home for good. Not that they were doing so good in the courtroom. They had practically been laughed out because of their age, and that was what the fight was about.

"I cannot believe that they wouldn't listen to us!" Sam raged. "Tucker even had a degree for this!"

Tucker sighed. "Yeah, but I used an online hack from a video game to change my age to get that."

"It doesn't matter!" Sam snapped.

Dani sighed and glanced around. Danny (as Phantom) suddenly became visible with a stunned look on his face. "Video game. . . what do you do in a video game if you're stuck on a level?" He murmured, looking thoughtful, then flew off into the sky.

"Where's that clown going?" Sam grouched.

"He said something about video games." Dani said. Sam rolled her eyes and went off on a tirade about 'boys'.

LINE BREAK OF LEGALESE

Dani sat in court, glaring at a knot of wood in the table. The grown-ups could be so stupid sometimes. She was a kid, she needed a home, she wanted to go with the Fentons, not Vlad. What was so hard about this?

"I'm sorry, but my client has right to the child as it was he who engineered the construction of the girl in the first place." Vlad's lawyer said. Dani glanced up for two seconds, long enough to nick-name the man 'sharp-suit', and then went back to glaring. Vlad's plan seemed to be to de-humanize her, make her into a 'thing', while at the same time acting as if he was doing his best to take care of her. It was, annoyingly, working. She hadn't even been called up to the stand yet.

Dani pulled out her ipod- a gift from Danny- and took a long look at it before turning on. It was black with the DP symbol on the front- or back, depending on how you looked at it- with typical white earbuds. It was pretty cool. She glanced at the song list and selected a song before cranking the volume.

"Sometimes I get so weird, I even freak myself out. I laugh myself to sleep. It's my lullaby. Sometimes I drive so fast just to feel the danger. I wanna scream. It makes me feel alive. . ."

Dani hummed along with the song. Something attempted to penetrate her eardrums but she ignored it, knowing that if she had to deal with any more ridiculousness she'd probably scream. And she had a loud scream.

Suddenly the earbuds were yanked from her ears none too gently. She glanced up to see a burly security guard glaring down at her.

"Mayor Masters has requested that you be restrained for everyone's safety." He stated in a voice like a rock gargling gravel chunks.

"Yeah? Well, Mayor Masters is a fruitloop. So buzz off." She said, snatching the earbuds and phasing them through his hand and back into her ears. She turned intangible whenever he tried to grab them back. She quickly muted the volume so she could hear his annoyed mutterings.

"You're a clone and you do things without rational thought!"

Dani smiled and unmuted the volume so she could sing along. "I'd rather be anything but ordinary, please!"

Then all heck broke loose in the courtroom, and for once it wasn't Dani's fault.

BVQA: Well? Worried now? Huh? Oh, yeah, and do you forgive me yet Dani?

Dani: Ok, I forgive you. You gave me an ipod.

BVQA: Yes!