"What could she have possibly meant by that?" Maddie said to Alicia as she paced around the kitchen. Alicia was sitting at the table with her cup of coffee, watching Maddie's antics with a long-suffering expression on her face and using silence for the deadly weapon it was. "She's important to Danny, and I doubt it's a stretch to say that he's important to her, so if she had something important to say, why wouldn't she have told him earlier?"

Alicia took a long sip from her coffee. Or she pretended to, anyway. Maddie wasn't convinced she wouldn't have burnt her mouth if she'd really done that, considering she'd just made it. Much as Alicia pretended (however poorly) to be above drama, she did love her theatrics. And making a point. And watching her sister stew, which Maddie was, which only made this worse.

"Don't tell me I should have asked her," added Maddie, "because you know why I couldn't ask her."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking it." Alicia hummed a noncommittal note that had Maddie scowling. "You were."

"If you're so sure of what I'd say to you, why are we even talking about this?"

"Because it doesn't make sense!" Maddie stopped and turned to Alicia. "Think about it. What does my being here possibly change that makes talking to Danny suddenly more important than it was before?"

"It was you being you, if I recall correctly," drawled Alicia, "which is a turn of phrase I'm assuming means a mite more to you than it does to me."

"It should," groused Maddie, "but instead, everything is making less sense."

"Because everything in your life makes so much sense."

"It used to! Or at least— At least I thought it did." Maddie pulled out a chair and finally joined Alicia at the table. She rested her head in one hand, pushing back her hair as she looked over at her sister. "How are you just—accepting all of this? You were never drawn to the paranormal like I was. Doesn't this unnerve you?"

"You know what I've been through and you think this is going to unnerve me?"

"It unnerves me," admitted Maddie as she straightened up to lean back in the chair, "so sue me if I'm a little surprised that you seem to be taking to this like a duck to water."

"Not sure I'd say that myself. I don't have a nose for this kind of thing like you do. For me, it's the reality right now, so I'll deal with it. I'll take whatever's thrown at me and roll with it before I crumble in front of those kids when they need me."

There was a familiar stubbornness in Alicia's voice as she said the words, and Maddie realized that Alicia was simply refusing to acknowledge the possibility that this might ever get to be too much because she simply wouldn't let it. She'd been Maddie's rock for ages, she was a beloved pillar of her community, she was going to be there for Danny and Danielle in whatever capacity they wished—

That mindset would take her far, but that didn't mean she wouldn't crack under the pressure eventually.

"You don't need to take all of this on yourself—" started Maddie, but a bark of bitter laughter cut her off.

"I'd decided to take on everything by myself long before the ink was dry on that divorce paperwork. I'd been doing it for long enough by then already, and I'm not about to change now. You might be happier facing things with Jack by your side, but I'm better off now than I was."

"I know, but—"

"But nothing. The kids need me, so I'll be here for them. That's that. Why do you think Danny came to me in the first place?" Alicia's tone made it clear she wasn't going to wait for an answer, so Maddie didn't try to get a word in. "You've all visited me often enough that he decided he could trust me. Do we need to go through this again?"

"No, no, I just— It doesn't matter. This isn't about you." Maddie chewed on her lip. "But I can't see how I'm supposed to factor into this, either. What changed?"

"With Danielle? Might've been you staying and not shooting. Far as she's concerned, that's a change."

Maddie winced. "That's not what I mean. I— You're you. Meaning she knew just by being in the same room as me that I'm not a ghost and I'm not being overshadowed. But if that were even being called into question and she could determine who I was on sight, why wouldn't she have done that in the first place?"

Alicia hummed, took another sip of coffee, and then said, "Maybe she didn't want to risk being wrong as much as she didn't want to risk being right."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Which should fit right in, considering you've been saying how much sense this whole situation makes."

Maddie huffed and crossed her arms. "Don't pretend like you understand everything."

"I don't. But I can accept that I won't understand everything, 'specially not right away, unlike a certain someone I know and love."

"But it still— I didn't do anything differently!" Maddie threw up her hands. "I don't understand what changed. Why she really wanted to see me when I don't think she wanted to see me at all. Why that confirmed whatever it is that she has to talk to Danny about."

"Have you considered that maybe she didn't want to tell him?"

"What?"

"You know how protective he is of her. Maybe that goes both ways where it can. Maybe she wanted to protect him from whatever this is and now she realizes she can't, so the best she can do for both of them is loop him in."

Maddie frowned. "Even if that's the case, she's in no state to protect anyone, and she must recognize that. I know why she wouldn't have said anything to me, but would she trust you enough yet to ask you for help on it if she wanted to keep it from Danny?"

"Would you trust someone that much if you only met them two days ago, even if they've been helping you?"

"In these circumstances? I would if I knew I couldn't handle it myself. Which is why I'm worried. There's something else going on, and we're going to misstep if we can't plan for it, but— I can't even broach the subject with her. I know she doesn't trust me, and I don't expect her to trust me, but I don't want anyone getting hurt because of what she knows and we don't."

"So is now my cue to tell you—"

"I'm not going back upstairs to ask her! If you'll recall, I just said I couldn't."

"I was going to say, 'Is now my cue to tell you Danny'll fill us in if we need to know?'"

"But if it's important, we will nee—"

"If what's important?"

Maddie startled and turned to see Danny standing in the kitchen entrance. "Whatever Danielle has to tell you."

Danny grimaced. "Yeah, I talked to her before coming down here. I'm not entirely happy that you saw her when I wasn't there, but it was her choice, and she made it for a reason, and we can talk about that later. But it's…." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Can you just, like, not question everything I say for two minutes?"

"Oh, sweetie—"

"She can if I duct tape her mouth shut," Alicia offered, and the smile on Danny's face at the prospect was the only reason Maddie didn't snap back a retort.

"No tape necessary, I promise."

Danny joined them at the table. "Okay. Here goes. I thought Vlad had given up on the whole cloning thing—"

"Cloning?" Maddie exclaimed, only to let out a yelp as Alicia kicked her under the table.

"—but apparently he hasn't," Danny continued without acknowledging her outburst, "and apparently Dani hasn't been travelling the world as extensively as I'd assumed. She's been staying off Vlad's radar because she knows how to do that better than me, but ever since we stabilized her, she's been growing into her powers and— I don't think that part matters. Point is, you didn't catch her because she just happened to be passing through town."

Maddie opened her mouth, but the roiling dread inside her drowned any words she could think to say.

"I don't think Vlad's original plan matters at this point because he's going to be making things up on the fly, but you need to believe me when I say he's up to something. And if you can't do that, I'll just— I'll ask Dora if you can stay with her until this is sorted out because at least Vlad can't track you there."

This was not the time to ask who Dora was (though the name was vaguely familiar) or why Vlad wouldn't be able to track Maddie—or anyone, presumably—at her place.

Clearly, though, Danny did not think it was the time for her to question everything else he had said, despite Maddie very dearly wanting to question it.

Cloning? That alone opened up a terrifying can of worms, mostly because she doubted Danny was talking about cloning bacteria—or a ghost's ability to duplicate themselves. And the rest of it….

Danielle knowing enough about Vlad's methods to stay off his radar—not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination, she was realizing—and being in town because she was trying to counter whatever he'd planned now? Something Maddie had apparently interrupted? Something that Danielle had still thought—somehow—she'd had handled until she'd seen Maddie herself?

Or had Danielle not thought that she'd handled it but thought she'd still have time to handle it, whatever it was, only to now realize she didn't?

That seemed more likely, though that possibility brought Maddie no closer to determining what was actually going on.

"I believe you," Maddie said, since she'd be a right fool to deny Danny now when she still had proof of Vlad's plan, whatever it truly was, tucked away in her pocket, "but I would like more details if you have them."

Danny blew out a breath. "Jazz basically pushed a kill switch on anything Vlad had in the field, but obviously that didn't work. I'm not sure he'd have been able to counter that without Jazz noticing, so maybe he divided up his resources and set up something Tucker hasn't found yet to deploy all those beetles. Both sets of them, I mean. Not just the ones that were attacking Dani."

"So you and Tucker—and Sam—check up on him routinely to keep track of what he's doing?" Maddie asked carefully, hoping Danny wouldn't take the question the wrong way. She didn't mean to question their competence or the necessity of it, but the ease with which he said it….

It was like he was talking about a long-running family prank, a game in which the warring sides had gleeful fun with each other, not something as terrible as what was apparently the reality.

How bad had things gotten if he could say something like this so offhandedly, as if it weren't an absurd thing to do, to need to do? As if doing so carried little to no risk? For it to be so commonplace as to be routine—

"We try, but at this point, I'm wondering if he struck a deal with Technus and set up something in the Ghost Zone to work on all the shady stuff where we wouldn't immediately know where to go to trash it. Dani hasn't found it if he did, but…." Danny shrugged. "He's got something somewhere, even if it's just farther underneath his mansion. I mean, if he was working with you to find me, he must've let you on his computer at some point, and there's no way he'd risk letting you find that stuff yourself. Plus whatever the deal with Dad is. You might want to think it's coincidental, but Vlad has to be behind Dad going missing in the Ghost Zone or someone would've found him by now. Assuming Dad's still in the Ghost Zone."

"You'll find Jack before anything too terrible happens to him," Alicia commented. "Man might not have the memory of an elephant, but he's certainly resilient as a cockroach."

Danny's lips twitched. "I hope so. But Vlad doesn't just want Dad out of the way, he wants him out of the picture completely. And if he can distract you…." Danny hesitated. "Look. I don't know how to put this delicately, but you remember when I said Vlad tries getting my DNA all the time?"

"I really don't like where this is going."

"Yeah, it gets worse." Danny made a face. "Vlad's been relatively quiet for a while. He stopped sending Skulker to kidnap me and played at being the dutiful mayor and everything—"

"Kidnapping?" She and Jack were well aware of the possibility, of course, because Jazz and Danny could both be targets of a particularly stupid ghost, given that they were the children of ghost hunters, but she hadn't—

"Just— Ignore that for now. It's not important. Point is, I let my guard down, Dani let her guard down, and Vlad got the better of us both. Dani feels rotten because she's convinced this is her fault since she didn't figure out what Vlad was doing until he'd mostly done it, and then she tried to deal with it herself and—"

"None of this is her fault," Maddie interrupted. "And if you're thinking it, this isn't your fault, either."

Danny sighed. "I know that, and you know that, but put it aside for now, okay? That's just context for this next bit."

"All of this is just context?"

"Vlad's experimented with human cloning," Danny said bluntly, "and I don't mean stem cells or whatever. And when he gets what he wants, he's got some way of accelerating aging. I dunno how he does it, but that always messed with his clones. Pretty much one wrong move on their part and they'd start turning into goo. But now he's figured that part out. They don't destabilize anymore."

Maddie stared.

Alicia didn't move, her coffee cup frozen halfway to her mouth.

Danny, apparently, was through pulling his punches. "I know he didn't get a mid-morph sample from me, but maybe he decided his clone didn't have to be a perfect clone of me and instead could be a chimera and he stabilized them with his own mid-morph sample. Except Dani thinks he didn't just stop at me this time, because I'm not the only one he's ever wanted."

Maddie opened her mouth again, but words still failed her.

"Look. There's no sugar-coating it. It's as horrifying and straight up gross as it sounds, and I'm not one hundred percent sure of Vlad's endgame, but I know he won't settle for an inferior copy if he thinks he can manipulate his way into getting the real thing. Which always used to involve getting rid of Dad and then swooping in and marrying you, except now that you know, well, enough, that's a harder sell and he knows it."

But Jack was in the Ghost Zone. Missing. Going in had been his idea, but Vlad had encouraged the idea of him going alone, and now—

Danny must have told Danielle about Jack.

Had Danielle thought that Maddie might not be the person who'd terrorized her but might instead be another tool of Vlad's? And something about seeing Maddie had tipped her off that Maddie hadn't been replaced even if she'd suspected Vlad might make such an attempt? Had Danielle agreed to see Maddie in order to verify her suspicions? Had Maddie's persistence in wanting to see her been what had made the difference? Had it been the fact that she'd traded in her usual HAZMAT suit for casual clothes—and then burned those and found herself in an old set of Alicia's?

Alicia huffed. "Regular bullets won't hurt him, I'm guessing? Gotta be those special ghost ones?"

"Alicia!"

"Just saying, if you need anything, it's all still stored in the same place. Broom closet and corner cabinet in the back room. Trigger lock on the gun's got the combination you think it does."

"We are not going to shoot him."

"Mom's right, it wouldn't help," Danny said, as if that were the problem and not the fact that she'd very recently learned that having all the appearances of a ghost didn't mean one had no humanity. Alicia hadn't been joking—Maddie wasn't sure if she'd meant shoot to kill or shoot to maim, though admittedly she had her suspicions—but as sickening as the situation that Danny described clearly was, there had to be proper channels for them to go through, hadn't there? On the ghost side, if not the human one?

Not that a human cell could hold a ghost without modifications.

Not that very many humans outside of Amity Park would believe any part of the story.

Did ghosts have their own laws? Their own legal system? Was there a ghost jail?

Could a ghost jail hold a human or would it be as effective as a human jail trying to hold a ghost?

"He'd just go intangible," continued Danny, "steal it from you, and turn it on you. Way safer not to pull any weapons on him. Unless Mom thinks she can make something out of the broken tech she scavenged. That would work. Or at least distract him. But I don't know how much time there is to do that."

"I'll see what I can do," Maddie said. She pulled the beetles—whole and pieces—from her pockets and took some small comfort in the weight of the metal in her hand. Weaponry was familiar ground for her. She and Jack had made do on scraps before; she could do so again, even on a time crunch, now that she had something concrete to start with.

"I'll go grab one of my toolboxes," Alicia said as she stood. "You two keep talking; I'll catch up."

"There's not a whole lot more to say," Danny admitted as Alicia walked out of the room. Maddie knew Alicia had a supply of commonly used tools in the kitchen, meaning she rightly suspected Maddie would need a wrench to get into the guts of this particular invention. "This is who Vlad really is. It's one of many reasons Jazz and I hate his guts."

"Danielle, too, I'm assuming." If she didn't, she'd hardly know to keep an eye on him in the first place.

"Yeah, but it's complicated."

How?

Maddie bit back the question. With everything Danny had just told her, if he'd wanted to elaborate, he would have. If she asked, he wouldn't answer.

Right?

Was she respecting his boundaries if she didn't push him for information or was she giving him the impression that she didn't care and had only been pretending, be it for well- or ill-intentioned reasons? Was he giving her an opportunity that she wasn't taking or would he be grateful she didn't ask for a story he didn't think she deserved to know? Was there a way to ask any of that without it reflecting poorly on her?

Maddie asked the important question instead: "How do we protect Danielle?"

"You do that," Danny said, waving vaguely at the broken technology on the table. "I can charge up your final project if it doesn't work on its own like I do with the thermoses."

Maddie blinked. "Wait, you're the reason the Fenton Thermoses work after sitting in the lab for a few days? It's not that they've absorbed enough residual ecto-energy to maintain a constant level?"

A sheepish smile crossed Danny's face. "There might be a few things I should probably tell you guys about your inventions. They're, um, not usually as broken as you think they are."

"I can imagine," Maddie murmured. Then, because she couldn't think of a way to put it delicately, she asked, "Is there something of ours I should try to mimic with this?"

"Not really. Based on what they were shooting earlier, your max output is probably going to be somewhere between a lipstick and a wrist ray. I kinda doubt you have what you need to build a Spectre Deflector or a Plasmius Maximus."

"A what?"

"It's what Vlad used on me when he stranded us at his cabin in Colorado. It shorts out ghost powers."

When Vlad had stranded them—? No. No, now wasn't the time to ask about that. She needed to know about this invention. "How?"

"I dunno. It looks like a taser. It shocks you. It hurts. It takes a few hours to recover. I didn't take the thing apart before I destroyed it; the last thing I wanted was to get caught with it and for you to get ideas."

Maddie pursed her lips. For someone like Danny—like Vlad, like Danielle—a shock to the system at a high enough charge might indeed be enough to scatter their ghostly energy. She knew from earlier experiments that ghosts could be destabilized and reform into the same ghost—or at least a new ghost with the same ecto-signature as the old one—as long as the initial spark of their core wasn't completely destroyed.

Well.

Destabilized was the wrong word, really. Destabilized implied that it couldn't reform. Dispelled or dispersed were better ways of describing it.

Depending on its strength, a ghost could ignore or be weakened by a mild shock, knocked out by something a bit stronger, dispelled by something stronger still, and only completely obliterated at levels of coulombs she and Jack had deemed too dangerous to build into their weaponry. Unlike with their ectoplasmic-based weaponry, a human could be hurt just as easily as ghost with that sort of weapon, and the current levels of a stun gun wouldn't cut it when it came to destabilizing ghosts that were more advanced than the blobs they'd typically trapped and studied. The ectopus Jack had caught the one time had been entirely unfazed by something that would stop a human in their tracks.

She and Jack still used electrical discharge in some of the weapons—she rather favoured the compromise she'd settled on with her staff, even if it did operate at non-obliteration levels—but they'd been coating their syringes in Fenton Anti-Ghost Goo long before they'd been filling them with ecto-suppressants. The chemical suppressant hadn't come until after their experimentation with electricity. They weren't the equivalent of tasing a ghost but did contain elements of phase-proof foam.

Jack's first attempt at Ecto-Dejecto had been a failure, strengthening ghosts instead of weakening them, but further trialling had allowed them to realize they could achieve their goal by hampering a ghost's ability to control its own ectoplasm. Ectoplasm that came in contact with their phase-proofing formula was rendered inert, temporarily losing its ability to turn intangible, so taking elements of that formula and tweaking it into something less viscous, something they could more easily inject into a ghost to the point that it couldn't escape—

That they couldn't escape.

That a ghost like Danielle wouldn't be able to escape.

"Mom, are you listening to me?"

Right.

The problem at hand.

Danny could have been giving her important details before he'd noticed that she wasn't giving him her full attention—or any attention, really.

Maddie felt her face warm as she realized Danny's reprimand had come with Alicia's return. "Sorry, honey. I'm afraid I got distracted thinking about our ecto-suppressants. I can't mimic the formula—I don't have the right materials—but I might be able to deliver a strong enough shock to Vlad to disrupt his ghost form."

"Shock?" Alicia echoed as she dropped a toolbox and two cases of wrenches on the table by Maddie. "Do I need to run to Johnson's for a cattle prod?"

"That might help," agreed Danny. "It would be easier than booster cables and a car battery. I wasn't sure if we'd be able to rig something like that up without, uh, bad things happening. It would be safer for you guys, too, since that won't kill you even if Vlad does get his hands on it." He paused. "I think."

Maddie sighed and pulled the set of Allen wrenches towards her, hoping Alicia had a small enough set buried inside the larger case to be useful. "Please let me try talking to him before you attack."

"Talking doesn't work," Danny said. "If anything, he'll just use it as an opportunity to make you hesitate. Or doubt me. Again. Despite ample evidence. Believe me, this is not the first time he's done it."

"I know more this time. It's not going to be like other times."

"Only if you don't let it be like other times. Trust me, okay? I'm not saying you have to shock him or blast him with whatever you can make the second he shows his face, but don't stop me when I do it."

Maddie looked to Alicia for help. As far as the law was concerned, Vlad wasn't a ghost. A premediated attack would hardly reflect well on them if this went poorly—which it may, given Plasmius's strength as a ghost and Vlad's fistful of strings he could pull to get some human help. Alicia might joke about using weapons not meant for ghosts, but surely she would realize what crossing that line would do if she thought about it?

"You hate the idea, huh?" Alicia didn't look surprised—but then again, neither did Danny. "You forget that he already attacked Danielle? We're back on my property, and I'm more than willing to protect her from someone like him."

"I didn't forget. I'm simply…." Maddie worried her bottom lip as she tried to gather her spinning thoughts. "Vlad's powerful. From the sounds of it, he's perfectly happy to use his wealth to get exactly what he wants. If he goes after us, we can't defend against that. Neither of us have the funds to cover the cost of going to court to fight this if it goes wrong. Jack and I would have to sell off our lab equipment and patents just for lawyer fees, and you…."

"Okay," Danny said, "I'll admit Tuck and Sam and I are still working on gathering evidence of him infringing on your patents, but he's done enough that we've gotta be able to get him on something." His pause was too short for her to formulate a response, and he'd continued before she had a chance to open her mouth. "I'm assuming Jazz told you he's supplying the Red Huntress with all her stuff? Second suit aside, since that was Technus? Anyway, we're trying to gather solid evidence for all the other definitely illegal stuff, too, not just the creepy stuff. So, if it'll make you feel better, fine, you two can fight solely with weapons meant to target ghosts. Doesn't mean you can't break apart a cattle prod and use it for parts."

He had a point.

"Would Johnson's even carry cattle prods?"

"Wouldn't suggest it if they didn't."

Maddie still didn't like this—didn't like any of it—but Danny had a better handle on the situation than she did; pretending otherwise was foolish.

And having a few more functioning parts to work with would help. She doubted Alicia would have been keen on replacing half her kitchen appliances after Maddie was through looking for things she could use.

"All right," she said, trying to muster up a smile for Danny's sake, "let's see how much we can get done before…." Before Vlad shows up. Before everything turns on its head again. Before the mistakes of the past come back to haunt me. To haunt us. Because I never looked for the signs or acknowledged them when they were right in front of me, because I kept making assumptions and mistakes and not listening and—and—

"Before— What's your polite way of saying it, before crud hits the fan?" Alicia suggested dryly.

Danny smirked. "That's one way to put it."