#dp Alicia

[fishyartist]

Building a dp wc au!

[jus-a-lil-mouse]

@crossoverdanuary Day 1: Prison

from @this-is-z-art-blog‘s phantom falls au.

Danny shifts, the costume he’s wearing itching through his shirt. He’s hot, sweatier than normal, and cannot believe that he’s doing this. He stomps around, the paw-shoes of the Abominable Snowman suit big enough that if he doesn’t pay attention to where he sets his feet, he’ll fall right into the metal bars of the cage he’s stuck in.

Why did Aunt Alicia even have a fake cage? And the costume? And dear God, why did Danny agree to this?

Dani opens the door to the main museum area. She sets his water bottle down near the shadowy corner of the cage. “Do you have to go before the tour comes in?” she whispers.

“No, I’m all set,” Danny whispers back. “Are you leaving soon?”

Dani grins wide. Right - that’s why he agreed to this. “Yeah! In just a minute. Thanks again for covering for me.”

“Just… Please learn how to drive the golf cart,” Danny replies. “You have to stop crashing the golf cart.”

Dani nods, but Danny knows she isn’t listening. They hear a bike bell from outside, and Dani perks up. “That’s Val! I’ll see you later. You’re the best, bro!” She gives him a thumbs up as she exits, and he weakly gives her a thumbs up back. She promised to bring back an entire pie from the Lunch Lady’s for him.

The door swings open again, and Aunt Alicia leads a tour group in. Danny shuffles his feet. He watches Alicia show off the other exhibits and seethes at all of the inaccuracies she’s spewing. The group is halfway around the room when he realizes Dash and Paulina are in the back of the group.

He gets even sweatier somehow, and turns to the door of the massive cage. The paw-shaped gloves make it impossible to grip the heavy door enough to open it. He frantically paws at it, desperate to make sure the other tweens don’t see him.

“And here you can see the ferocious yeti!” Alicia announced. Abominable snowman, Danny corrects silently. He turns around slowly. Dash’s eyes light up and Paulina disinterested stare turns cruel.

“It looks pretty small to me,” Paulina says, interrupting Aunt Alicia. “And so raggedy. Like a wimpy dork getting eaten by feather boa.”

“Yeah, I bet yetis aren’t even real,” Dash snickers. “Probably just some nerd in their fursuit.”

Danny was saved from further embarrassment by a tourist in the front. “Yetis are real,” he announces confidently. “This one is so wimpy because we’re too far north. It’s malnourished. Yetis live much further south than people expect.”

If Danny really was an abominable snowman, he’d be pulling his fur off. Yetis weren’t native to North America; their slightly smaller cousins the abominable snowmen were. But he couldn’t say anything because he was in a stupid costume. Shit, was Dash right? Is this a fursuit?

Alicia cut in, swiftly taking over the tour. Danny shuffled around and kicked at the floor. He’d show them. He’d get a real abominable snowman, using the Journal, and he’d show them all.

[ladylynse]

Chapter 14 [FF | AO3] of Revision: Maddie can’t deny it any longer. If ectoplasm can become blood, there’s more to this story than she ever realized.

Beginning | Previous

-|-

“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.”

-|-

Continued on FFN | AO3

[ew-selfish-art]

Dpxdc Au - Tim and Danny are Twins, have been through all the introductions and after a few years decide to have The Audacity. 

At some point it hits the two of them, that they really do act alike sometimes. Like, mannerisms and small detail micro expressions, the whole nine, so Danny and Tim decide to take advantage of this.

Parent trap style swapping but all within the same household, they cut their hair and swap clothes, and get in a few practice runs around the halls of Wayne Manor. No one in the family catches them through at least 3 family dinners, so they go for the larger gambit. 

Tim wants to go to high school for a bit and get back into skate boarding with low stakes- Thats what he tells Danny at least, he really wants to spend the time dismantling the GIW from the epicenter in Amity Park. It works out that Tim accomplishes this in record time (explosives didn’t require ethics in his opinion) and does actually get to enjoy his hobbies again for a bit. 

Danny wants to tell off the WE board members and get some proper Red Robin training so he’s not so dependent on his powers when facing human enemies (they were squishier than ghosts, restraint was key)- That’s what he tells Tim when the reality is he’s going to lead a hostile takeover of DalvCo. and well, yeah, actually get some training in. 

No one catches on except for Kon. 

After they’ve swapped back and their missions are debriefed, Tim asks him why he never fell for it? Simply put: “Uh, dude. Your twin doesn’t have a heartbeat half the time, it was pretty easy to tell.” 

[glow-worms-are-believers]

Always room for seconds (dp x dc)

"There they go again," says Aunt Alicia as she looks at the hazmat-clad backs of her sister and her husband jumping into their mish-mash-of-a-van. "And on Thanksgiving too," she finishes to herself as she turns toward her niece and nephew. Neither of them look surprised, though Jazz is clearly more affected if the tick in her jaw is any indication.

"They promised," she practically spits but Danny just sighs and puts a hand on her shoulder. It seems to draw the fight out of Jazz a bit and she sags onto herself.

Alicia loves her sister but she can be so irresponsible sometimes.

"Come on kids, let's go back inside. It's about time to put the turk-" she stops short, then groans. Maddie had insisted on bringing the turkey on account of not wanting Alicia to go to all the trouble, and Alicia had agreed on the condition that her sister wouldn't try to make it. "...And the turkey is still in the van isn't it?"

Danny makes a face. "It's probably for the best. I'm pretty sure I saw it move on the way here."

Alicia doesn't let her head fall into her hands, but only just. Instead, she takes a deep breath to calm herself down to rally her thoughts. "Alright. It'll be too late by the time we drive to town and buy a new raw one, so we can just get some already made from the store. That good for you guys?"

Jazz and Danny make sounds of assent before all three of them pile up in the car. Town isn't too far away, and the trip is mostly silent. Alicia is hesitating over what to say to cheer up her niece and nephew. In the end, they pull up to the grocery store before she manages to come up with anything.

"Dad was also supposed to bring desert," Jazz mentions as she grabs a caddie and wheels it back to them.

"I made apple pie just in case," Alicia answers. Despite her dislike for him, she can admit that Jack Fenton is a generous man. However, as she has learned over the years, that generosity doesn't extend to fudge. Which is why she's got her famous apple pie ready to pop into the oven.

Danny nods relieved, as he files in behind his sister. The three of them are rolling past the frozen section when a familiar voice cuts through the store music.

"Alicia?"

At that, Alicia looks up to see the face of one and only Martha Kent. Her lips stretch into a smile unconsciously at the sight.

"Martha, hi," she answers as the other woman starts walking closer. "How are you?"

"I'm good," the other woman says as she stops in front of them. "Just doing some last-minute shopping." Then Martha looks to Danny and Jazz and gives them a smile. "And who might these two be?"

"This is Jazz and Danny," Alicia introduces them, "my niece and nephew. They're spending Thanksgiving up at the cabin with me."

"Oh, that's wonderful!" Martha says sincerely. "You left your sister and her husband in charge of the turkey, then?" She winks.

Alicia winces. "Ah, not exactly."

"They had a work emergency," Jazz says, unhappy.

Martha lets out a sympathetic oh.

"That's why we're here," Alicia explains. "They left with the turkey without realizing, so we'll have to settle for store-bought this year."

Martha makes a noise of sympathy before her face shifts into something more pensive. "You know," she starts. "I've got a big turkey at home and there's only going to be my son and me to eat it. If you guys would like, we'd love to have you over to help us with it."

"Oh we couldn't possibly-" Alicia starts to protest but Martha takes a step forward and takes her hands.

"You'd be doing us a favour," Martha says, her hands still into Alicia's as she looks up earnestly at the redhead. And damn it all because Alicia can feel a blush spreading on her cheeks at that.

"Alright," Alicia says, too flustered to argue.

Martha squeezes her hands once before letting go and Alicia can't help but miss the warmth of them. "Then it's settled."

"Alright," repeats Alicia. "We'll have to swing back home, though. I made pie."

"That's wonderful!" Martha's smile is radiant and it makes something in Alicia's chest warm.

She disguises it with a cough before speaking up. "Is six thirty too early for you?"

"It's perfect. We'll be waiting for you then," Martha says. "And for your sister and her husband too, if they manage to tear themselves away from work."

"That's not likely," mumbles Danny under his breath. Uncharacteristically, Jazz doesn't say anything about her brother's manners, only putting her own hand on his shoulder. Martha catches Alicia's eye and they exchange a look.

"Well, we'll be glad to have you three, anywho," Martha states firmly which gets her a hesitant smile from Jazz.

Alicia clears her throat. "We'd better get going if we want to be ready in time."

"Oh yes," Martha agrees. "I have to make sure the turkey's not burning." Then she winks, and for some reason, Alicia can feel that pesky blush coming back. It's made worse by the shrewd look Jazz gives her.

"See you soon!" says Martha as she leaves.

"Bye," Alicia answers back a little weakly. Then she looks down to the ground and sighs. When she straightens her head, she's immediately on guard as she catches her niece's smug look.

"What?" Alicia asks warily.

"Is Martha single?" Jazz asks, with a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth face.

"Yeah," the older redhead answers slowly. "Why?"

"Just wanted to know," Jazz says innocently. And even Danny is looking at his sister suspiciously now. "since you've got a crush on her and all."

"I do no-I don't know what you're talking about!" Alicia protests though she feels her cheeks warming for the third time today.

And now Danny is starting to smirk too as he exchanges a look with his sister. "Oh," he starts as he looks towards Martha's disappearing figure. "This is going to be fun."

[escelia]

Danny can't recall many fond memories of his childhood, but ones he did remember often included their summer trips to his Aunt Alicia's in the countryside where he and Jazz would play in the woods just outside the Kent family's farm. The Kent's were a wonderful family who took his parents' ghost talks in stride, and they were always kind to him and Jazz. Danny loved when Clark and his wife Lois were in town while they visited. They always had really cool stories on account of them being journalists. And if Danny seemed to notice that Clark tended to treat everything like it was glass, or that he seemed to hear things way better than he should... well, Danny wasn't going to say anything about it.

It was about a year after Danny's accident that the Fenton family made a trip back out to Alicia's. Clark happened to be in town; he heard the Fentons were coming. He'd heard shouting coming from Alicia's, but had initially thought nothing of it. The Fentons were a loud family, always getting into some sort of trouble. Then he heard the sound of their weapons firing; a little weirder, but still normal for Jack and Maddie. And then he heard a cry for help... that's when he found Danny stumbling through their fields, covered in dirt and blood and green, glowing goop. He had a gash in his side that he gripped at in pain, and his eyes burned a toxic green in his determination to get to the farmhouse. He clung to Clark as soon as he was close enough.

"Please help me," he whimpered through ground teeth. "My parents are hunting me, please you have to help me!" Probably a meta, he thought, angry that Jack and Maddie could do something like this to their own son, meta or not. With gentle hands, Clark lifted the child he'd known since he was a baby and got him to the safest place he could think of for medical attention. It was time to smuggle a child into the Batcave.

OR

Clark has known Danny his whole life, and when an identity reveal goes sideways in the countryside, Batman helps Clark adopt Danny.

[satoshy12]

Aunt Alicia called her family to visit her in the isolated woodland town. For a whole week, they would stay there. Closed all in Amity Park, and a shield around the portal so Ghost can't leave it,... They should have built that first before the portal. But we weren't even sure that Ghost really would come.

As the Fenton were there, he had a boy with her, a child of an old friend of hers. He calls him Respawn; he was a clone. And she needed her family's help with it; she has no idea how to raise a child. And Deathstroke kind of failed most times. And he asked her for it; he will visit once a week.

Respawn has no idea how he was named Steve, after Steve Rogers from the comics. It turns out his new mom and aunt were fans of the comics and thought first that his dad was the Super Soldier of the US. But she learned he was a mercenary, and now Alicia wants to have a little Captain America! For the first time, a family will have a hero! Wait... Alicia:" Do you even want to be a hero?" Respawn:" ... sounds like fun?" Maddie:" Yes! First time, a hero!"

+

Danny wasn't sure what to say. Danny:" But..." Jack:" We know that you tried your hardest to play Hero as Phantom Danny. But well, we are proud of the crimes you committed while doing it. But do it outside of Amity Park, please."

Respawn likes his cousins too, Uncle? Jack is pretty funny. And Danny likes to fight too! And he didn't fight like a hero—too brutal. No wonder the rest thought he was a villain. And Jazz talks with him to help him with his problems?

+

Ex-Villians Fentons, who all retired. Fentons knew Danny was Phantom and were sure he was just Meta and not Half Ghost. But we were proud that he started to be a villain, even if he was confused at times.

[starlightshore]

AU comic foundation (as I'm still planning it out).

A mix of "Danny is taken in by Aunt Alicia and not Vlad" and "Nobody knows" AUs. Jazz is still alive because losing your parents is already hard enough, I don't want Danny's entire life to be ruined here. That's not to say he isn't completely a wreck though.

After an incident, the Fenton kids and Alicia move to a little town named Amity Park... Surely nothing will go wrong here as well, right?

The comic will be jumping around and dealing with the mystery of what exactly happened to Danny. As well as some new, strange events that affect the town soon after his arrival.

Really, I just wanted to explore a Nobody Knows Au while making Danny a bit more harsh and edgy than usual, haha! I want to try something more dark and serious than what I usually make as well.

[charlietheepicwriter7]

"I'm telling you, she's the best bloody runes expert this side of the Mississippi," John Constantine told the other members of the Justice League as he raised his hand to knock on the old screen door. He hadn't expected his ex-wife to stay here, in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, but Spittoon, Arkansas, was the hill-billy hole it was when he last left. "If anyone can decipher the ritual to summon the ghost king, it's her--"

The door disappeared before he could knock, and a shotgun was shoved in his face. John smiled the best he could. "Hey, sweetheart."

Alicia Walker glared back at him. "Constantine."

*******************************************

This is the "John Constantine used to be married to Danny Fenton's Aunt Alicia" AU. Some idea's I've had:

Maddie introduced them. Maddie had dragged Alicia into studying ghosts, but Alicia ended up fascinated by the occultism of ghosts, more metaphysical than scientific. Maddie, wanting to support the sister that was supporting her, found Constantine, introduced the two, and they got along enough to bang.

it was a shotgun wedding. Alicia got pregnant and damn if she was going to let her baby be born without a father, so John ends up marrying her. He doesn't really mind since Alicia's nice enough and the sex is good, but he isn't exactly an attentive husband.

The baby is actually twins! a boy and a girl.

The babies are born without complications, but the baby boy, the first born... goes missing.

In addition to selling his soul to multiple parties, John had also sold the soul of his first born... probably to multiple parties. And he'd forgotten all about it until Alicia calls him, sobbing, saying their son has gone missing.

Needless to say, once she knows, John is divorced within the week.

the newborn daughter is given to Maddie to take care of; Alicia can even look at her without remembering her dead son, she knows she wouldn't be able to take care of a baby the way it needs. she can barely take care of herself.

(Jazz finds out that her aunt is her biomom when Danny is born. She never hates her aunt for giving her up; in fact, it's Alicia's depression and grief that makes Jazz want to study psychology in the first place)

Alicia moves to Spittoon to isolate herself, but the close knit community won't let her self-destruct. They help her rebuild herself in the middle of nowhere and she discovers a love for farming rhubarb.

John only shows up once before for Alicia's help, but the town chases away that nasty ex-husband of hers before she sees him, with his yuppie-accent and dirty clothes. They don't want him around her.

Alicia grows content with her life. She keeps all her occult books locked in the attic, out of sight and out of mind, and while she might regret not having been able to raise her daughter, she loves her niece and nephew and spoils them when they come to visit.

All's right in the world.

Until one day, Jazz and Danny come to her door in the middle of the night, desperate and injured.

Not too long after that, her yuppie ex-husband come around, asking her to look over some nonsense summoning circle. What's Constantine trying to summon anyway, the demon of astrology!?

[elyon-rose-hydra]

DC X DP Prompt #2

So what if Maddie Fenton was an Al Ghul.

Ra's always seen Madaline as his favorite (much like he does with Damian in Demon Twin AUs), but Maddie wants out and explore the world of Science further.

So as a young adult she fakes her death, she finds a cabin in the middle of the woods in Spittoon Arkansas.

Alicia took in Maddie and declared her, her sister.

Years later Ra's Al Ghul finds out his favorite daughter is alive, married, and has four children.

When he watches his son-in-law at first he doesn't like how loud the man is but is pround on how strong the man is and that he can fight and that he is protective of his family and really loves his daughter

He watches his eldest grandson who for some reason has red eyes. He is worried about his firery-temper though

He watches how smart his granddaughter is and how skilled she is with a bat

He watches how his grandson reminds him of a mellow Damian but can be feral. Ra's is also intrested in how when he gets angry his eyes glow pit green but brighter.

He watches his free spirit youngest daughter and can also can be a bit of a gremlin and eyes also glow green when angered.

Ra's doesn't like the man named Vlad and his plan to ruin his daughter's life by killing her husband, marrying her, and forcing his grandson to be his son. He will have to deal with him later.

[olivethetiger]

“Danny gets a sudden growth spurt because his dads side bla bla bla” ok but consider JAZZ getting all the Jack Fenton absolute buff as hell brick wall genes

[fishyartist]

Happy 20 years of Danny phantom! I don’t have anything special unfortunately but I got! some sketches ^u^

[seas-storyarchive]

Crazy au

Back when Danny and Jazz were little, Alicia's farm burns down, a forest fire that spread to her farm during the night - she got out okay. Her pride wasn't really as alright.

She moves in with Jack and Maddie, basically becoming nanny to Jazz and Danny. Look, it took her a bit to adjust. Taking care of kids, and her sister and her brother-in-law (Jack). Like, she just doesn't leave but the family is fine with it because it's family.

Breakfast, lunch and family dinners are mandatory. Alicia has shut off the power grid more than once, it's going into the high double digits, sometimes multiple times in the same day. Who let her be in charge of the house? She just took over so the kids had stability with their parents working and so Jack and Maddie didn't have to worry about their kids running wild.

Alicia put up a sturdy fence around the small yard of Fenton Works and turned some of it into a patch of garden to have tomatoes, potatoes and other plants (some on hooks, some in a greenhouse that no one put up a fuss about her having). Danny in particular, back then and to present day, helps his aunt in the garden. Jazz was more of the "wash the veggies" type of kid so that was fine

Gives the kids extra money with a wink ("hey, $20 extra for you to go pick me up some small," Jack/Maddie leaves the room "cheap chocolate, you keep the change.")

the years pass, and Jazz and Danny listen to Alicia moreso than their parents because it's always been that way - they still love and listen to their parents, don't worry, it's mainly when the parents are working

Jazz knows her home situation isn't normal, but loves and appreciates her aunt for the stability she's attempted to give her

Danny loves his aunt, she's the best! She's helped him fix his room over the years to match his interests and recently she gave him space wall-clings for his room (guys, is it manly to hang space themed wall clings on your walls? no? oh well, onto the wall it goes)

Alicia singlehandedly prevents the whole Phantom situation - Danny is given the options: be grounded for (attempting, at the time) taking people down there without hazmat suits and breaching the containment zone for doing that, or take his friends to the movies with some extra cash and curfew being extended 15 minutes (for Jazz too)

they guys all just hang out at the mall instead

Alicia likes Tucker the most out of Danny's friends. She has had many a problem with Sam - from her snide comments about her wearing overalls all the time, to her pitching a fit the first times she ate dinner there because she didn't know Sam was an ultra-recyclo-vegetarian but doesn't ban Danny from hanging out with her because aside from the comments made by a 14 year old being annoying, she's harmless and she'll grow out of it, right? Tucker's parents are at first confused when they meet Alicia ("wasn't she the aunt?" "I'm sure it's nothing too strange.") but they adjust to her and they like her company. Sam's parents HATE her (mutual, honestly)

and then Alicia met Vlad. It's a strange meeting between the two, with them being awkward around each other

but the meetings kept happening, and the Fentons began to see Vlad take an interest in Alicia - maybe he'd truly given up on chasing Maddie?? - and then it started to be reciprocated by Alicia after a bit

So yeah, Alicia/Vlad becomes a long-distance thing for a while with them going to visit each other (Alicia coming back with gifts for the family - Vlad bringing some too when he visits)

[ladylynse]

Chapter 12 [FF | AO3] of Revision: Maddie can’t deny it any longer. If ectoplasm can become blood, there’s more to this story than she ever realized.

Beginning | Previous

-|-

The ghost dog stopped growling, but Maddie couldn’t exactly breathe a sigh of relief yet. It hadn’t taken anything from her, and she wasn’t sure if it would.

Her eyes caught on its collar. “What do you say, Cujo? Do you want a treat?” She waved the cookie for emphasis, but she’d seen its ears perk up at the name.

She’d never called it by its name before.

She hadn’t known its name before.

She’d never gotten close enough to it to notice its name before.

There would be a lot of firsts from here on out, assuming things went the way she hoped they would.

“Normally you couldn’t have this because it has chocolate chips in it,” she cooed, trying to convey with her tone what she couldn’t with words, “but you’re a ghost, yes, you are, which means that doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Not like a few chocolate chips would take out a dog that size anyway,” Alicia muttered, and Maddie had no compunctions about driving her elbow into her sister’s side.

Overriding Alicia’s yelp, Maddie said, “Here you go, Cujo! Here’s a treat for you.” She tossed the cookie, and the dog swallowed it whole.

And then it shrunk in size until it was the little pup it had been when it had first come through the ghost portal—which had already vanished at some point when she’d been distracted earlier, from the looks of it.

She hadn’t been sure that would work, but maybe it appreciated that she was trying, if it had enough concept of what she was doing to understand that.

Or maybe Danny had told it that threats were fine but maiming was off the table.

Either way, she wasn’t going to bet on its good mood lasting if it changed so easily.

“Are you looking for Danny, Cujo? Are you looking for Phantom?” She had no idea what name the ghost dog associated with Danny. She had no idea if the ghost dog understood what she was saying. Tone would only get her so far, but she had to try.

“Hey, little buddy,” Alicia said, getting down on one knee and holding out a hand. The ghost sniffed and then let her scratch it behind the ears. “We don’t know where Danny went, but it must be pretty important if you came to find him, eh? Is there something we can do to help?”

Personally, Maddie thought Alicia was banking on the ghost dog understanding a good deal more than she was.

Cujo whined.

“Yeah, you’re a good boy who just wants to help,” Alicia said as she continued to pet the ghost as if it were a real dog, “so how about we help you, yeah? Which of the kids needs our help?”

“It’s not going to be able to answer you,” Maddie murmured, and Alicia shot her a skeptical look.

“Have a bit of faith, won’t you? Once he knows we ain’t gonna do more harm than good, he might take us where we need to be.”

Well, the ghost dog hadn’t tried to bite Alicia’s hand off, so Maddie supposed there might be some truth in that after all.

Although—

Wait.

“You said you didn’t know where Danny was going, but you do. He’s going to talk to Danielle, and you know where she is.”

Alicia huffed. “He never said he was going straight there, and I doubt he will if he’s worried about being followed.” She turned her attention back to Cujo. “You just missed him, boy, but I’m sure you can sniff out where he’s been and find him back there again.”

She was still being very careful not to mention their location in Maddie’s hearing.

Not knowing what else to do, Maddie gave Cujo another cookie, hoping her son would show up in the meantime.

He didn’t.

Cujo didn’t leave them, either.

Maddie wasn’t wearing her HAZMAT suit. She was still in borrowed clothes. She had no containment devices in her pockets, no weapons up her sleeves, nothing within arm’s reach that would help her fight a ghost unless she wanted to take it on with Alicia’s cast iron frying pan and a salt shaker—neither of which worked well (or sometimes at all) on the ghosts they’d encountered in Amity Park, judging by the preliminary tests she and Jack had conducted. Any ghost that was more than a fleeting memory of who they’d been when they were alive was too strong to be contained by those methods, and those that appeared to have formed naturally from semi-sentient ectoplasm weren’t affected at all. There were herbs—

No. No, just because the ghost dog had come here, it didn’t mean the trouble on the other end was a ghost.

It might be something—someone—she could defeat without any of that.

Even unarmed, she could hold her own against humans.

So could Alicia.

That was one thing they still had in common.

All right, then. Maybe this was another thing Alicia was right about. Cujo must be looking for Danny—this encounter would hardly have gone half as well if the ghost had been after her—and if it (he) had enough sentience to do that, she should stop selling it (him) short.

Maddie dropped to a crouch beside Alicia and held out her own hand towards the ghost dog. “Will you take us to where we can help?”

Cujo sniffed at her hand and licked it clean of crumbs before sniffing around and scratching at the floor by their feet, which Maddie supposed counted as progress but didn’t really help in the grand scheme of things.

Then again, she hadn’t really expected this ghost to suddenly start talking—or understanding, for that matter.

Maddie glanced at her sister and asked in a low voice, “Do you really think there’s trouble? Cujo’s shown up back in Amity Park to play with Phantom more than once.” Three days ago, she’d have said to terrorize various neighbourhoods, but her perspective had shifted a bit since then. It had shifted in the last three minutes, really, never mind three days. She wondered if it would ever stop, but stopping wasn’t necessarily a good thing. She wouldn’t turn up her nose at a plateau, though. “If he tracked Danny here….”

Alicia pursed her lips. “I’m still worried about the kids.” To Cujo, she said, “Hey, buddy, do you think you could dig us a tunnel to wherever you need us to be? Do you think you could do that? For Danny?” Her hand was empty, but she drew it back as if to throw something and sent in an arc towards the floor. “C’mon, Cujo, let’s go!”

Cujo yipped.

Even as Maddie watched in astonished disbelief, he started to paw more vigorously at the kitchen floor. Instead of leaving scratches in the wood, though, she started to see the lurid green she associated with ectoplasm shining through.

The patch grew, and she feared Cujo might disappear into it entirely, but even once the would-be portal was large enough to fit him, he stayed. And dug, as much as he could dig without harming anything in the physical realm. It looked like some special movie effect. He stood over what seemed to be a glowing green puddle, scratching at the edges until it was large enough for a human to tumble through, and then—

Then, something about the puddle—the portal—changed.

The green flared brighter and then took on the appearance of a sun-stained pop bottle. It seemed…thin. Flimsy. Brittle.

And not entirely green, as she got a glimpse at the thinner parts.

Beside her, Alicia had gone quiet, but the sound of her sharp intake of breath told Maddie she’d recognized something in the warped almost-image Maddie herself hadn’t.

“What? What is it?”

“Danielle’s in trouble,” she said, reaching forward to grab Cujo’s collar with one hand and Maddie’s arm with the other just as Cujo broke through.

-|-

An ear-piercing trilling sounded through the air, and Jazz jumped and spilled half the contents of her coffee mug.

Mostly on the floor as opposed to herself, fortunately.

She abandoned her mug on the counter and grabbed a tea towel to blot at her clothes, thankful now that it was closer to lukewarm than scalding.

“Ah, you’ll have to excuse me,” Vlad said as he got smoothly to his feet. “That means it’s time to feed my cat.”

Normally, Jazz wouldn’t buy an excuse as weak as that, even though she knew cats typically either disappeared the moment company showed up or were immediately demanding attention, but Danny had mentioned something about Vlad and a cat, hadn’t he?

Still.

She couldn’t just trust him.

“You have a cat?” Jazz echoed as Vlad opened a hidden panel in the wall by the light switch and silenced the constant ringing. “Did you lock it in a room or something?”

“She’s upstairs.”

“And you need an alarm to remind you when to feed her? Shouldn’t she be coming to you demanding to be fed? Especially if this is the time you usually feed her?”

“She’s upstairs,” Vlad repeated as if that explained everything. Maybe he’d locked her in a room—or series of rooms—if she hadn’t shown up yet. Maybe Jazz could call animal welfare on him? That might depend on how healthy the cat looked….

“I’ll come with you,” Jazz said even as Vlad shook his head and told her there was no need.

Tough.

She was going with him anyway.

Vlad must have resigned himself to this fact because the most he did was ask her to move aside so he could get into a cupboard that held what looked like crystal saucers. She’d think the extravagance was purely for show, except it was Vlad, and there were good odds that he truly didn’t want to use anything less.

A can of wet cat food was still a can of set cat food as far as Jazz was concerned, though. It was no doubt the best money could buy, at least if Vlad was putting his money where his mouth was, but Jazz took some comfort in the fact that the entire routine meant Vlad hadn’t been pulling her leg about the cat.

She trailed after him as he headed upstairs.

The cat, it turned out, had been locked into a series of rooms, but to Vlad’s credit—if Jazz were being generous enough to give him any credit—it included a screened off outdoor play area at the back of the house that seemed to span the width of at least two rooms.

She couldn’t remember it being there the last time she’d been in his backyard, but she hardly made a habit of being in Vlad’s backyard.

Jazz joined Vlad on the deck and leaned against one of the cat trees, watching him as he put down the full saucer, picked up the empty one, and traded the old water bowl for a fresh one. “Where’s your cat?”

Before he could answer, Jazz heard a hiss from somewhere above her.

She looked, but she still couldn’t see the cat.

“Did you get a ghost cat?”

“I assure you, Maddie is perfectly alive. She is simply discerning about those she allows to touch her.”

And see her, apparently.

Jazz made a face. “You named her Maddie?”

“If you could see her, I’m sure you’d agree she looks like a Maddie.”

Jazz was sure she wouldn’t agree, but whatever. Better Vlad have a cat than keep up the creepy pining after her happily married mother. This was improvement. Not a lot of improvement, but still improvement. “Okay. Great. You fed your cat who hates anyone who isn’t you. Now will you finally be honest with me? About this whole situation with Danny and Danielle and whatever garbage you’ve been feeding Mom?”

She wasn’t expecting him to agree.

She wasn’t expecting him to disappear, either.

Crud.

Jazz lunged forward to grab at where Vlad had been, but her hands closed on nothing but air. Either he’d turned intangible at the same time or he’d already moved. She spun and raced for the door instead. It was still closed, but with Vlad’s ghost powers, that wouldn’t matter. She’d have to take the time to open it; he wouldn’t.

Jazz grabbed at the door handle, but it wouldn’t turn. “Vlad?” She pounded on the door with the heel of her hand. “This isn’t funny! Let me out!”

No answer.

Crud, crud, crud.

“This is false imprisonment, you know!”

Nothing.

When she got out of here, she was going to kill him.

Jazz glanced behind her, but Vlad’s cat hadn’t emerged from her hiding spot. Jazz scowled. Feeding time, her foot. Whatever that alarm had been for, it hadn’t been the cat.

She pounded on the door a few more times for good measure, screaming the obscenities she hadn’t voiced earlier, and then shook out her stinging hand. She could get out of this. She just needed to figure out how.

It wasn’t likely that Vlad had spared any expense building the cat structure, but Jazz wouldn’t let the disembodied hissing deter her from looking for weak spots she could exploit. Or makeshift tools, come to that. She’d hardly had a chance to explore these rooms. There had to be something.

Maybe, if she could find herself something nice and solid, she could just try to punch a hole straight through the wall. It would serve Vlad right for trapping her in here. She’d need to avoid the support beams, which would likely require a more reliable method than knocking on the wall, but if she got desperate enough, she’d take her chances.

Jazz glanced at the door again.

The lock was on the other side.

The hinges were not.

If she could find something to help her get the hinges out, could she open the door from the other side? Even if it was locked? Could she open it enough to create a weak spot where she could kick her way to freedom without worrying about breaking something on a bad swing? It was wood, not metal. Kicking a hole it in should be possible. Maybe not if the door was solid wood—something she’d happily check with any convenient inanimate object she could pry loose—but then again, that might just make it more difficult. Not impossible.

Jazz touched the Fenton Phone on her ear to switch her mic back on. “Sam, Tucker, I hit a little snag, but I’m going to recover and get back on Vlad as soon as I can. Any updates on Dad?”

“No,” was Tucker’s reply.

“Define ‘a little snag’,” was Sam’s.

“Some alarm went off and Vlad locked me upstairs with his cat.”

“I’m sensing a story there,” Tucker said, “but that’ll have to be for later. I thought you disabled his alarms.”

“So did I. Maybe I did it wrong. Or maybe he re-enabled it with a clone or something once we were back in the kitchen. I can only stop what I can see.”

“And now you can’t see anything. Because he locked you in with Maddie the cat.”

Leave it to Tucker to point out the obvious. “I’m working on it. This is a setback, not a victory for him.” She bit her lip. “You’ve really got nothing on Dad? Still?”

“Sorry.” Sam’s voice sounded apologetic. “Maybe try his cell phone in case he came back through a natural portal? He could’ve hit one early on, and that would explain why no one has seen him.”

Yes, it would.

It wouldn’t explain why Jack hadn’t called them, though.

Even if he’d arrived in a dead zone, he was using the Spectre Speeder. That thing had been designed to keep up with ghosts. He could have been spat out into the middle of the open ocean and still made landfall by now, right? It had been hours since anyone had started to look for him and longer still since he’d left for the Ghost Zone. Besides, the Spectre Speeder had a GPS system. He wouldn’t be lost.

Failing that, Jazz was fairly sure they’d installed a satellite phone as part of the Spectre Speeder itself. It went hand in hand with the navigational system. Not every system would fail. That would be enough. Something would be enough.

Wouldn’t it?

Danny had told her time travel was possible. Once. In an offhanded comment he had refused to elaborate upon.

The iron vice in Jazz’s chest that she was refusing to acknowledge tightened around her lungs.

They’d find Jack.

They had to.

He couldn’t go missing now that they’d finally found Danny—or, at least, now that Danny had let himself be found.

“If you try phoning and don’t get an answer,” added Tucker, “try not to think the worst. It might not be the worst. It might just be a dead zone. Which is painful, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the worst.”

Jazz couldn’t fault Tucker for not remembering the finer details of the Spectre Speeder. Why would he bother learning about the satellite phone when all of them carried extra Fenton Phones, just in case?

“Yeah,” she said instead. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.”

She sighed and slumped against the door, forehead first, and closed her eyes. She should be scavenging for supplies. She should be venturing into the demon cat’s territory in search of something useful. She should be doing something, figuring out some way out of this, figuring out how to fix everything—

She was just so tired.

“This is all Vlad’s fault,” she said aloud, but the words came out all wrong. It sounded like she was trying—poorly—to convince herself of them. “He saw an opportunity with Dad and took it. He wants the leverage.”

There.

That was a little more convincing.

Jack wasn’t leverage if he couldn’t be returned hale and whole and alive, right?

Jazz sucked in a breath, held it, and then let it out in a rush.

She would figure this out. She would fix this. Danny was safe. Danielle would be okay. They would find Jack. She might be able to smack that smug smile off Vlad’s lying face.

…She’d leave the punching to Danny this time. He’d need a fitting target. He might not have confirmed what she suspected about Danielle, but the lack of details with the little she did know painted a pretty good picture. It might not be completely accurate, but it would be accurate enough.

She’d figure out the right words to say to get through to their parents. She would. Or she’d catch Vlad in a lie. Or maybe, at the end of all of this, they’d see it for themselves, and she wouldn’t have to say anything.

That would be nice.

“Okay,” Jazz muttered. “First things first: get out of here before Vlad does something to somehow make this situation even worse.” Then she could figure out what to say to fix things.

Second things second, after all.

-|-

Maddie had still had the sensation of falling, even though her head told her she hadn’t always been falling down.

She’d rolled forward and down—and through, somehow—and now she was on her back. She’d fallen, but she’d also—come up? Unintentionally somersaulted but hadn’t gotten all the way back to her feet because she hadn’t expected her downward to suddenly become her upward?

However it had happened, she now lay on a bed of fescue, squinting up into the sunlight. “How—?”

“I don’t think we have time for questions,” Alicia said, looming into Maddie’s view and offering her a hand.

Maddie took it, letting Alicia pull her to her feet, and then she blinked as she recognized her surroundings. “Is this the old Jones place?” The farmyard up the road hadn’t had occupants on the home quarter since before Maddie had been born, but everyone in the community still used it as a landmark.

“Dottie wasn’t the only one I asked for a favour,” Alicia said. She hadn’t bothered to brush off the grass from the landing after their tumble through the portal, and more than a few broken strands had caught in her hair. Maddie figured she mustn’t look any better and started to brush herself off, but Alicia clicked her tongue. “Come on. Cujo might’ve come to fetch Danny, but if he did, he must’ve just missed Danny’s arrival, because I’m pretty sure your boy’s already here. He’ll know help’s on the way, too. Cujo already went inside.”

Now that Maddie was looking for it, she could see a steady green glow filtering through the windows on the second floor. The house had never been boarded up—she and Alicia had biked over here to explore as children on more than one occasion—and was mostly intact despite its lack of upkeep, but Maddie hadn’t ever— “Who even owns this place now?”

Alicia frowned at her before turning away and starting towards the house, though she did call over her shoulder, “If you have to ask questions, can you at least try to keep them relevant?”

Maddie caught up to her in a few quick strides and grabbed her arm. Alicia stopped, maybe because she was being nice and maybe because she didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the martial arts skills she knew Maddie regularly honed. “We should be smart about this if Danny’s fighting off a ghost. I don’t have any weapons on me.” Maddie’s world might have been turned on its head recently, practically everything she knew about ghosts very much included, but if Danny was fighting a hostile ghost, giving that ghost two targets to overshadow that Danny would hesitate to hurt wouldn’t help matters.

“Would you feel better if we grabbed a big stick or some rocks first?” Alicia shook free of Maddie’s grip and pointed down the overgrown lane. “Road’s over there if you want gravel.”

“I know where the road is,” Maddie said, not bothering to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “That’s not the point. Those won’t do anything against a ghost.”

“So we don’t fight it. We distract it and let Danny handle the fighting. From what I gather, he’s good at that. Too used to it not to be.”

Maddie sucked in a breath but didn’t want to let Alicia know how much that had stung. “We could be making matters worse.”

“Not doing anything might make matters worse, too. You wanna chance that after Cujo brought us here? I don’t think he’d’ve done that if he didn’t think we could help.”

Maddie bit her lip, watching as pink flashed against green.

Walking into the middle of a ghost fight unarmed was the worst thing she could think of doing, but her instincts hadn’t been doing her any favours lately.

“Okay,” she whispered, “but we stay low and try to keep out of sight until we see an opening to actually do some good and help.”

“You do that,” Alicia said. “I don’t do the hiding thing. I just go in there and do the doing thing.”

“But we don’t even know who’s inside!”

“And we won’t know if we don’t go in there. Not like you can sneak a peek through a window.”

“But—”

“How will knowing who it is help you anyway?” Alicia huffed. “You know what? You’re right. It is better if you stay out here. We don’t have Danielle’s answer yet. So I’ll go up and help, and you stay out here and shout if you see the wrong kind of backup coming.”

Maddie frowned. “You know perfectly well ghosts can make themselves invisible. If more come, I doubt they’d let me see them.”

“Yeah, see, that? That’s why you’re actually right this time. Because your first instinct was to correct me about ghosts instead of being concerned about the fact that Danielle is up there in the middle of a ghost fight she’s not equipped to handle—”

“I’ve seen Phantom fight. I know how good Danny is.”

“But we’re still both hoping that he’s up there instead of finding out for sure because we’re standing around yakking like we’ve got the time to waste when in reality Danielle could be trying to defend herself against whoever or whatever is up there with her!”

“What do you want me to say?” Maddie snapped, her temper getting the better of her. “What do you want me to do? Like you’ve told me, I can’t just fix this, and every move I make has the potential to make it worse! So what’s the right play here if you’re so wise? Do I go in there and try to help or stay out here because going in there might make everything ten times worse than it already is?”

“What do you think?”

“If I knew what to think, I wouldn’t be asking you!”

“You damn well know what I think by now,” Alicia shot back. “Sometimes there aren’t any right answers. Sometimes you make the wrong decision. But you need to accept that you made the wrong decision and set about making things right instead of dithering over the thing like feeling bad about it will make the entire mess go away. And if this is a thing that can’t be fixed? Then you fix the things that can be fixed and stop poking the bear.”

“You—” Maddie swallowed. “You really think this can’t be fixed?”

Alicia’s mouth twisted. “I think saying it can be fixed like it’s as simple as slapping a band-aid on a kid’s scrape is underestimating the complexity of the situation.”

That wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either.

“I’m going up. You decide if you want to follow or if you’re good out here.”

Maddie’s stomach twisted itself into new and interesting knots as she watched Alicia slip inside.

Without weapons, they couldn’t help. They’d be liabilities. They’d make the situation worse.

But Alicia had already gone inside, armed with nothing more than grit and determination, and Maddie….

Danielle was here, and maybe going in would make things worse. Maddie wasn’t dressed like she was in the lab, but she couldn’t change her face. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she kept her distance? Made it clear she wasn’t coming back to finish what she’d started?

Jazz would know, but Jazz wasn’t here to give Maddie the advice-laden lecture she sorely needed.

The kids might need help, though.

They might need her help.

Fighting a ghost was perhaps not the best way to try to show Danielle that she was trying to change, but trying to help might be a start.

Maddie took a deep breath and then closed the distance to the front door, wincing as the wood of the porch groaned beneath her weight. Inside was little better—the wood might be less weathered, but everything was coated in more than a fine layer of dust—but it never had been great, and if the stairs had taken Alicia’s weight, they’d take Maddie’s.

She couldn’t hear shouting from upstairs, though. That was unusual for a ghost fight, especially one that Phantom—Danny—was in. Banter was part and parcel of his game.

Maddie climbed the stairs, following Alicia’s tracks and skirting a broken cobweb that had tangled with the railing.

Every room upstairs was empty.

Well.

Every room was empty of people, anyway—Alicia included.

If they hadn’t argued outside, if she hadn’t hesitated—

It was too late for that.

She’d have to piece this together on her own.

One bedroom contained a mattress that clearly hadn’t been there long enough to become a home to mice or any other critters. A rumpled pillow sat on top of it, but the blanket was pulled half off the bed and stretched across the floor. The room was free of dust but not of scorched wallpaper, and even through her dust-clogged nose, she thought she could detect the sharp, ozone-like smell that spoke of the aftermath of a ghost fight.

Half-hoping for an entertaining light show or a setup had been wishful thinking, though.

Even if nothing else had given it away, the stains of blood and ectoplasm on the mattress and the wood around it were hard to miss, and some of them were bright enough to be fresh.

Not to mention the bugs. Not real ones; these were too large for that, at least for this area. These particular bugs were—or at least had been—electronic.

Maddie toed a blackened beetle that was a good six inches long, nudging it over to get a proper look at it and promptly wishing she hadn’t.

It looked entirely too much like the invention she’d been working on with Vlad to be anything but his work.

These weren’t electronic; they ran on ectoplasm, just like all her inventions with Jack, and the ectoplasm they used as a power source—

Pink against green.

Different sources of ectoplasm.

Vlad wouldn’t have any reason not to use his own when it was his most readily available supply and he was in no danger of destabilizing his ghost half.

She wasn’t smelling the aftermath of a ghost fight; she was smelling the aftermath of an attack by these—these robotic beetles, the same ones that were supposed to have the destroy part of the proposed search and destroy function disabled to expand their range. (Not that Maddie had gotten the impression that Vlad had implemented that idea in the first place, despite it being in his plans, but clearly a lot of her impressions had been wrong lately.)

There should only be one beetle. Vlad had said it was a prototype, and he hadn’t shown her earlier prototypes in their quest to see what might be most easily adapted to their purpose. At the time, she’d assumed it was because he hadn’t had any more, but between the tracker she’d found earlier and…and all of these…. She could see enough pieces (smashed or frozen or simply blasted to bits) between the very scorched, very intact robots that she knew the beetle she’d worked on either hadn’t been a prototype at all or it had been the prototype meant to improve upon whatever these were.

Meaning Vlad had lied to her.

Why was that so surprising when she knew what he could be like? When Jazz and Danny had both warned her what he could be like?

Why had she been so naïve as to think he wouldn’t lie to her when she was in a desperate situation?

Why did it hurt so much to realize he had?

Maddie didn’t have gloves, but she picked up the robot at her feet and examined it anyway. It was warm to the touch but not uncomfortably so. That was definitely a blaster coming out of its mouth, with the firing mechanism making up most of its head; its power source was embedded in the abdomen, and there was something in the thorax, something that was clearly meant to do something or it wouldn’t be there, but the firing proboscis told its own story.

So did the scorch marks on the walls, come to think of it.

The green glow had been steady. A shield, then, rather than repeated ectoblasts? If the ricochet—

Maddie stopped and shook her head. She didn’t have time to be analysing the aftermath of a ghost fight. She didn’t need to. She knew what had happened. Danielle had been here. Danny had been here. Alicia might have been here long enough to be responsible for the smashed remains of the last few beetles before they’d all disappeared, and Maddie wouldn’t be surprised to learn Cujo was responsible for their escape.

But the beetles.

Vlad’s inventions.

Not only were they much further along than anything he’d shown her, but they’d also explicitly arrived and attacked.

This wasn’t defense.

She’d seen enough fights to have an idea of what that looked like.

Something this small, already capable of flight and scuttling into nooks and crannies to hide, didn’t need to devote a lot of resources to defense. The blaster had been designed for offense. It could tilt to adjust the angle, but she couldn’t see a means for it to shape the ectoblast—the ectoplasm—around itself as a shield. That was hardly the most common ghost defense, anyway. It was much easier for a ghost to simply go intangible or invisible—

Wait.

Maddie looked at the thorax again, and then she looked around for another robot that hadn’t been reduced to scrap metal as a comparison.

Could that have been designed to output a pulse that would disrupt the light waves from—?

No.

No, she was getting sidetracked again.

That wasn’t the point.

The point was that these machines were inventions of Vlad’s, they’d found Danny and Danielle, and they’d attacked, despite Vlad’s insistence that he wanted to find the kids as much as she did.

He had never specifically said why he’d wanted to find them, so of course she’d assumed his reasons aligned with hers, but now—

Maddie might—might—have believed that one beetle attacking had been a mistake. A glitch. An error in programming. Vlad was careful, but mistakes were made, especially in a rush.

She wouldn’t believe the same mistake was responsible for the actions of the ten or fifteen robots that looked to be scattered in this room in various states of destruction. Something like that would’ve turned up in earlier testing, and these weren’t prototypes. They couldn’t be. They were too consistent. Vlad had never been one to make multiples of the same thing without testing it out first; he’d always complained that Jack was wasting resources whenever Jack had done that in his excitement. Maybe something had changed in the last twenty years, but—

Danny was right.

Alicia was right.

She hadn’t been listening.

Not to the right people, at any rate.

She’d been too worried about making the same mistake all over again that she’d been ignoring the evidence right in front of her, reasoning away the concerns of the people whose opinion should have mattered most—

Not anymore.

Maybe this wasn’t a situation that she could fix, but she had to try, and she had to start somewhere. Since she hadn’t really started before, despite her intentions, then she was going to start right now.

Or, rather, she was going to start once she found them again.

At least she knew the way back to Alicia’s from here.

-|-

Next

[squirrellysketches]

dp side hoes day something: aunt alicia

ft maddie fenton

[papiliomame]

Aunt Alicia: Slice of Life

Shortly after Alicia's divorce, her sister Maddie visited her to support her in these difficult times. Maddie oldest kid Jazz recently learned to read and devoured every book that came her way. The youngest Danny is just amazed by the sheer amount of words his sister can understand.

Alicia would never admit it but she was thankful that Maddie was there or she would have cut down the entire forest in rage if her sister didn't stop her. Her preferred method of cutting trees is to glue a picture of her ex-husband on a tree so that would get her blood boiling during the task. This method proved to be a quite effective to finished this task in a timely manner for the following years.