6/10/24-Rewritten for quality and continuity. I'll be pausing my edits and rewrites after this one to focus on the next new chapter and simply to take a break from this, so don't be surprised by the sudden drop in quality! It won't be long until I take care of it. Hopefully, by the time you read this it's already done!

Chapter 11: There's Nothing Like a Trio

In the Foley household, dinner was being served. Tucker brought the food to the table, where his wife Valerie and son Raymond were waiting. Raymond was about to grab his plate when the doorbell rang. Tucker got up to get it, but Raymond knew who it was. He raced to the door and opened it, seeing a slightly panicked Alex standing in front of Heather.

He was confused, but he didn't question. "Guys, what took you so long? Go head up to my room. Let me grab my dinner, I'll see you shortly."

As Raymond was grabbing his plate, he was stopped by his dad. "Hold on, remember what I said about friends at dinner? You eat first, they can come back later."

"Come on, dad! This is important! We have plans! Come on, just this once?"

"Fine. But just this once."

When he got to his room and closed the door, he asked the most obvious question. "So, what's with you guys acting all weird? It better not be anything illegal. I am not breaking laws for you!"

Heather took a deep breath to calm her fear. "It's not illegal. But when I show you, you can't freak out. You gotta promise me that, Ray."

"No freaking out, got it. I promise."

"It's also absolutely top secret, so you can't ever talk about it with anyone but us," Alex added.

"Okay, top secret. Weird, but I'll keep quiet."

Heather closed her eyes, took another deep breath, and transformed.

Raymond stood in awe. "Well... It's too ridiculous to be made up..." He spun the computer chair Heather was sitting on, investigating her. He brushed through her hair, feeling it practically float through his hands. "Woah. This is insane."

"Okay, you can stop, I'm not a statue." Heather pushed her chair back a bit. "It gets better when I tell you that my dad is Danny Phantom."

"You've got to be kidding. There's no way a ghost is your dad!"

"You're right, sort of. A ghost isn't my dad. My dad is a ghost. Half-ghost."

"Oh, no way! That is insane!"

"Yeah, but that's not the point. The point is, he has a secret lab, we stole a secret laptop, and I want to find out why my dad wanted to hide all this from me. And I want to do it without him knowing, cause I'm in too deep to tell him anything now." Heather pulled out the laptop from her bag and handed it over.

Ray took it and gave it a look-over. "Well, this thing is old, I can tell you that. What do you want with it?"

"I'm thinking you check it out, see what you can find. Maybe back it up in case it dies or we lose it."

"That's doable. Shouldn't take more than a day."

"We'll also need your help with one more thing," Alex said. "It'll have to wait for the weekend, though."

"It better be fun and at least mostly legal," Ray said.

Heather turned human, then fell back on Raymond's bed. But as she hit the surface, she stopped hitting the surface and instead phased right through it, landing in the tight space under the bed. She dragged herself out and stood up, dusting herself off and acting like nothing happened. Alex and Raymond stared. Heather slowly sat down on the bed and gently leaned back in hopes it wouldn't happen again.

Alex glanced at her one more time, then turned back to Ray. "The secret lab. We need you to hack the security. We want to see what's up with it, secretly."

"That'll be tough, but I think I can manage," Ray said.

Heather lifted her head to comment. "Perfect. You're now part of the ghost team! As long as you keep this a secret of course."

"Awesome, this is gonna be fun!"

"Trust me, it's more fun for you guys then it is for me. But I won't lie, powers are pretty cool." Heather sat up and held up her hand, then turned it invisible, just to be a show-off. "We're gonna head out, so have fun with that laptop!"

Until the weekend, Heather's days were filled with training with Yoltrun and Alex. When the weekend finally came and Heather had the house to herself for a little bit while her parents had a trip to the grocery store, Alex and Raymond came over for the security system hacking. Two days was enough for Ray to take care of the laptop, and for him to brainstorm how this system could be hacked.

He was lucky to find some info online for this system, after Heather spent the previous night looking for the model. This system was slightly modified from the original schematics, but it was similar enough not to matter. The three seventh graders were outside the secret room in the basement, ready to hack the system. Ray was plugged into a hidden keypad, trying to gain access to the main security panel through it.

Ray tied back his long poofy hair and cleaned off his glasses. He took out some snacks and a drink from his backpack, and sat down on the folding chair with storage boxes as a makeshift desk. He typed in a few commands in his program and frowned at the results. "This might take a bit longer than expected. Good news though, the cameras don't work. As long as your parents have lots of errands to run, I can take care of this undisturbed."

Heather's ghost sense went off when Cujo entered the room. He jumped up onto Heather's shoulder (luckily, he was nearly weightless so it didn't hurt) and licked her ear. Heather sat down on a box and the dog hopped to her lap and curled up to sleep.

"Well, Cujo is fine with that," Alex said.

"Don't take too long. We only have an hour, two if we're lucky," Heather said.

Raymond stared intensely at his laptop. "Don't get your hopes up too high, but I think I can make that deadline."

An hour passed, and with Alex exploring the piles of boxes and Raymond purely focused on the hacking, Heather fell asleep. She only woke up to Ray's enthusiastic yell of "yes!" and Alex falling off a box in surprise and crashing to the floor. Cujo was nowhere to be found.

"Huh? What happened?" mumbled Heather as she half stood up, half floated off from the box she fell asleep on. When she realized she was floating, she crashed back into the boxes.

"I did it! I'm in! No more security, no more ghost shield, no more alarms! And, watch this!" He unplugged the computer from the keypad and took out his cell phone. He tapped on the screen a few times until the bricks parted, revealing the secret storage room. "Unfortunately, the second wall still needs ghost energy to open. It's on it's own separate system, a custom one that I don't have enough time to figure out."

"Hold on, you let me fall asleep? Seriously?"

"Heather, the wall?"

"Oh, yeah." Heather summoned a bit of ghost energy and shot it at the wall.

Raymond looked in awe as the wall parted to reveal the lab. "Woah. This is better than I thought."

"We've got a bit of time. Lets check things out!" This time, Heather was not afraid to take a long look around this room, and focused the most on what was in the back of the room.

Alex walked over to it. "What do you think this is? I've been wondering about it since we first broke in."

Heather followed. "Yeah, I've been thinking about it too. My grandparents showed me pictures of their old lab a few times before they moved away. I think that's a ghost portal."

6/10/24 Do I think Tucker and Valerie are a good pair? I'm not sure. But high school me decided it was the best way to get her into the story. Little high school sophomore me literally just took the easiest shortcut cause I wanted her in the story and it seemed likely enough. Not sure what I'd do with her now but rewriting her relationship to the plot isn't worth it!