Jack sat at his work station in the lab. He couldn't focus on his work today. Looking to his left, his gaze traveled over his desk until it landed on the framed picture that sat in front of him. Him, Maddie, and their old college buddy. They haven't seen him in years. He always wondered what happened, why Vlad never spoke to them again.
Jack sighed. There's no use dwelling on the past. He just had to hope Vlad was doing well these days.
"Jack, are those samples ready yet?" Maddie called across the room to him.
He spun in his chair to face her. "Yes, Maddie. They'll be ready in-"
A crash sounded from upstairs and both he and Maddie turned to look towards it. Maddie stood up, planting her hands on her desk.
"What was that?" She shouted.
Jack stood up and walked up behind her. "I don't know." He frowned.
He made his way across the room to the stairs. Maddie followed behind him.
"Maybe it's Danny and his friends?" She said.
"Or a ghost." Jack glanced at her. "Stay alert."
"Right!" Maddie brandished her gun and a focused expression crossed her face.
Together they made their way up the stairs and through the heavy duty doorway. They tiptoed through the kitchen and backed up against the wall that divided the room from the kitchen. Jack peeked around the corner.
There was a figure in the living room, He looked just in time to see them fall to the floor. That must've been what that crashing sound was. This person couldn't stay on their feet.
He popped out from around the corner and pointed at the figure on the floor. Maddie aimed her gun at them.
"Put your hands up…" Jack trailed off as his eyes adjusted to the dark lighting in the living room.
Lying on the floor in front of him was their old college buddy Vlad Masters.
"... Spook." He finished softly. He heard Maddie gasp beside him.
"...please." Vlad spoke. "Help me…"
Jack couldn't believe it.
"Vladdie?" Why was Vlad here? What happened to him all these years they've been apart?
"Vlad, what happened to you?" Maddie exclaimed. She walked across the room and bent over to help lift him off the floor. She laid his arm across her shoulders and lifted him up. Vlad groaned as he stood up.
That was when Jack took in the state that Vlad was really in. He had green spots all over him.
"Why are you covered in ectoplasm?" Jack reached a hand out and stepped closer to the two of them. He squinted at him. "Did a spookum get you?"
Vlad opened groggy eyes and looked at him. "No. I'm sorry to show up so unexpectedly. I didn't know what else to do."
"We haven't seen you since college!"
"Where have you been all these years?" Jacked asked.
"I'm sorry for disappearing…" Vlad looked away from Jack. "There was something I never told you two. Something that I was afraid to tell you."
A pit formed deep in Jack's stomach.
"Do you remember my portal accident?"
Now Jack felt almost nauseated. Of course he remembered Vlad's portal accident. He'd never been able to forgive himself for getting his best friend hurt.
"That it didn't work?" Vlad continued. "And I got hurt?"
Vlad shuddered. "It changed me. In a way I couldn't explain."
Jack frowned. What did he mean by that?
"It wasn't until the doctors diagnosed me with ecto-acne that I understood." Vlad finally looked back up. First at Maddie, then at Jack. "I had somehow obtained ghostly attributes in that accident."
Vlad coughed and Maddie gently guided him to the couch in the living room. She slowly sat him down and covered him in a blanket. He took a deep, shuddering breath before he looked back up and continued.
"They cured the ecto-acne, but there was still something wrong with me." Vlad held a hand to his head, a vacant stare now in his eyes. "Sometimes I would have trouble keeping my form. I started my own research but I couldn't find a solution. I was getting weaker."
He looked back up at them.
"I'm destabilizing. And I need your help."
Both Jack and Maddie looked at him with shocked expressions.
"What can we do though?" Maddie asked.
Vlad looked at them with such conviction that Jack couldn't help but believe him. "You're the most brilliant ghost scientists there are. If anyone can help me, it'd be you."
Jack shook his head. He didn't understand. Vlad was destabilizing? Wasn't that something ghosts did if they grew to be too weak? Humans couldn't destabilize. Did that mean that Vlad was a-
"Can you excuse us for a moment?" Maddie spoke in her pretend cheerful voice. It set off the alarm bells in Jack's head.
She grabbed onto the collar of his jumpsuit and roughly pulled him out of the room and into the kitchen.
Jack turned to look over his shoulder to see Vlad frowning sadly at his lap. Jack frowned at that.
Maddie tucked them back against the wall they had been hiding behind before. "How do we know we can trust him? What if he's a ghost?"
Jacked looked over his shoulder. "I don't know. Shouldn't we trust him? He was our best friend."
Maddie leaned past him to look past the wall to where Vlad sat in the living room. "It doesn't matter if he was our friend. A ghost is a ghost."
The alarm bells in Jack's head grew louder. "He seems to believe he's still human though." Maddie placed a hand on her chin as she listened to him speak. "We could use the ghost catcher to see if we can separate the ghost from him."
"That could work." She said. "If he's human, it'll separate the ectoplasm from him. If he's a ghost, we'll know."
Maddie put a smile on her face and walked back into the living room. Jack followed her, conflicted. Vlad didn't seem like a ghost. He seemed normal. Ghosts were evil.
Jack stopped beside Maddie in the living room. She clapped her hands together.
"We'll help you! We want what's best for you!" Maddie closed her eyes and tilted her head. "We'll just need you to come down to our lab so we can start working."
Vlad smiled at them. "Thank you. How can I ever repay you?"
Maddie walked up to Vlad and placed a hand on his shoulder. "It's nothing! We just want you to get better." She helped him up. "Now let's get you down to the lab."
She walked by Jack as she continued talking to Vlad. "We'll figure out how to get you fixed up in a jiffy. I'm sure we have something to help you. We have an assortment of ghost hunting and research inventions. Surely something will help."
Jack frowned at their backs as they headed towards the basement door. He sighed and followed after them, the pit still deep in his stomach.
He made his way down the stairs and into the lab. When he got down there he saw Maddie sitting Vlad down on the lab table.
"Right here, Vlad. Take a seat on this examination table." She gestured to the cold looking table in the center of the lab. "We'll start by taking your vitals."
She pulled a couple things out of the drawers in one of their countertops. The first thing she pulled out of her new pile was a stethoscope. She placed the earpieces in her ears and put the other end to his chest. She listened carefully.
"Hmm… Heartbeat is slower than normal." She pulled a thermometer out next.
She placed it in his mouth and studied it closely. She took it out of his mouth and read it.
"Temperature is near hypothermic."
Then she took out a blood pressure measurer. She wrapped it around his arm and squeezed the pump a couple times. She pressed the stethoscope to his arm and listened for a few moments.
"Blood pressure is low." She said quietly. "Jack, would you be able to get a blood sample? I'll get a swab of his mouth to test for ectoplasmic viruses."
Jack shook out the bad feeling in his stomach and threw a smile on his face. "You got it, Mads."
He grabbed a syringe from her pile on the counter and turned to face Vlad. As he turned he could see Vlad visibly gulp. Jack smiled at him sympathetically. "Don't worry, Vladdie. This'll be over before you know it."
Vlad smiled softly at him. "Thank you, Jack."
"All done, V-Man!"
Vlad looked down at his elbow that Jack was in the process of wrapping. "Wow, that really was fast."
Jack smiled at him again and Vlad looked like he was about to say something else when Maddie suddenly shoved a swab in his mouth.
"Swab acquired!" She said excitedly. "Let's go examine these, Jack!"
"You bet, Maddie!" He exclaimed. He turned to look back at Vlad. "We'll be right back."
He walked across the room to Maddie's workstation.
"Here's the blood sample, Maddie."
"Look at this, Jack. This swab shows no traces of any ecto-viral infections."
Jack frowned. "That's good, isn't it?"
Maddie shook her head. "Not if we're hoping that Vlad isn't really a ghost."
They both looked down at the microscope sitting on her desk. This wasn't really looking good for Vlad…
Jack held up the syringe and spoke softly. "Let's take a look at the blood sample."
Maddie grabbed it from him and set everything up. She slid the petri dish into the microscope and bent down to look through it.
She looked back at him.
"Jack, take a look at this."
He took her place and looked through the microscope. The ectoplasm here didn't look out of place. It looked almost as if it belonged there.
"This is odd." Jack said as he looked at it. He stood back up and turned towards her. "Maddie, I think this ectoplasm is melded to his DNA."
Jacked turned to look at Vlad over his shoulder. He coughed into his blanket and took a deep breath.
"I don't think he'd survive it if we removed it."
Maddie shook her head. "Nonsense, Jack. This is probably what's making him sick. Surely using the ghost catcher and separating it from him will cure him."
"But what if you're wrong?"
Maddie squinted at him, pointing a finger at him. "Are you doubting me?" She asked lowly.
"No. I think we just need to think more critically about this instead of jumping right in." Jack said.
"But he's a ghost!" Maddie shouted.
"We don't know that!" Jack whispered back at her.
"Is everything going alright over there?" Vlad called.
"Oh!" Maddie threw her hands into the air exuberantly and turned back towards where Vlad sat, walking over to him. "Everything's okay! We have a way to cure you!"
Vlad smiled a big smile at her. "Really?"
"Yes!" Maddie said cheerily. "We're going to use the Fenton Ghost Catcher to remove the ectoplasm from your DNA!"
"What?" Vlad shouted. He backed away a couple steps away from her, looking ready to bolt if she so much as moved wrong.
"The ectoplasm must be what's causing your illness." Maddie walked across the lab and dragged the ghost catcher out of the closet it was sitting in and across the room. She patted it. "This bad boy will remove all of it!"
Vlad took another couple steps back, the blanket falling off from his shoulders and to the floor. Jack stepped up and held an arm up in front of Vlad.
"Maddie we can't do this!" Jack pleaded. "He's not comfortable with this!"
She gestured behind her at the ghost catcher. "We have to do this otherwise the ectoplasm will kill him!"
"Removing the ectoplasm will kill me!" Vlad shouted from behind Jack.
"The ectoplasm is what's killing you!" Maddie shouted back at him. "What else could it be?"
Vlad rolled his eyes and threw his arms into the air. "Why won't you listen to me?" He held his hands to his chest. "Why do you insist on hurting me?"
Jack took another step forward. "Maddie, please. This is our friend."
"How do we know he's not a ghost?" She threw back at him. "How do we know he's not tricking us?"
Vlad sighed. "Even if I was a ghost, not all ghosts are evil like we hypothesized. I was terrified for so long that I would become evil."
He leveled a look at Maddie.
"But that never happened. Because I'm the one who decides who I want to be. Not whether or not I have ectoplasm." Vlad looked away from Maddie.
Jack was about to stop her when he saw Maddie approaching Vlad quickly but stopped once she wrapped her arms around his shoulders.
"I'm so sorry, Vlad." She whispered into his shoulder. "I went about this all wrong."
Vlad wrapped his own arms around her. "It's alright, Maddie. Thank you for believing in me." They smiled at each other.
Jack walked up to both of them and placed a hand on each of their shoulders. "Now let's get back to work. We have a friend to fix up. We've got an old concoction that always seemed to make spooks stronger. We can try that if you're up for it, Vladdie."
"That's probably our best bet." Vlad placed a hand on his chin. "I've tried just about everything else. That's something I've never thought of before. Genius."
Jack pulled the two of them closer to him. "Let's get started!"
Qqqqqqq
Jack picked up a vial from his set that sat on his desk. He stood up and turned to face Vlad where he sat beside Maddie.
"Alright, Vladdie! Here it is! A fresh batch of ecto-dejecto! Are you ready?"
Vlad turned around to face him and Jack's heart twinged at the fresh ectoplasm that covered his face. Vlad smiled at him. "As ready as I'll ever be."
Jack handed the vial to Maddie and she filled a syringe with it.
"Okay. Here we go."
Vlad squeezed his eyes shut as Maddie plunged the syringe into his upper arm.
"All done."
Vlad's eyes shot open just as the ectoplasm started seeping back into his skin, the blemishes disappearing right before their very eyes. A big smile spread across his face.
"It's gone." Vlad laughed. "It's all gone!"
He walked up between Jack and Maddie and wrapped his arms around their shoulders.
"Thank you! So much." He glanced between them. "How can I ever repay you?"
Jack jostled them. "Just don't disappear on us again!"
Vlad chuckled softly. "I can do that."
