Chapter Text
Jack reached for another piece of fudge and felt only the cold ceramic of the plate. He looked over. All of his fudge was gone? Hadn’t the plate been full when he’d brought it down to the lab just half an hour … He glanced up at the clock. Two fifty-three in the morning. Oh, he thought. He’d been tinkering with the new Fenton Wail Flail and snacking on fudge for almost four hours.
He’d forgotten that Jazz and Danny weren’t going to come down and say goodnight before they went to bed, signaling him to do likewise. They were off in Chicago to see a public lecture by the psychology professor that Jazz hoped to do research with when she started college in a few months. She’d convinced Danny to tag along with a promise to stay overnight and see the new exhibit at Adler Planetarium the next day, and she’d made it clear to her parents that she wanted only Danny tagging along with her for this first encounter with her prospective future mentor, which had stung Jack a little, but it was good for those two to have quality one-on-one time before Jazz moved out. They’d grown so close these past few years, and maybe the trip would get Danny to think more about college himself.
Jack wiped his fudge-holding hand on a cleaning rag and pulled out his lab notes on the Wail Flail to record tonight’s modifications. The idea of the device was to emit a tone that, when the flail’s head came in contact with a ghost, could vibrate the ghost at a resonant frequency and temporarily disrupt its ghostly abilities, thereby making it —
CRASH!
Jack spun his chair around quickly enough to see Phantom’s hand crumpled awkwardly against the rattling door of one of the Fenton chemical cabinets. It looked like the ghost had tried to reach into the cabinet with a hand that was suddenly no longer intangible.
“Hey, it doesn’t even need contact!” Jack congratulated himself with a grin. The Wail Flail was a good fifteen feet from the ghost and had still succeeded in shorting out Phantom’s powers.
Another crash sounded as some new container that had been unbalanced by the shove to the cabinet tipped over. Phantom jumped back out of a clear healthy respect for whatever chemical reactions might now be taking place among the spillage. There shouldn’t be anything too volatile going on, as chemicals that would react violently with each other were stored in separate cabinets, but an unexpected explosion would hardly be a first for this lab.
“Sneaking in to steal more of our tech, eh, spook?” said Jack, unholstering the ecto-blaster at his hip. The ghost had been stealing from them for almost two years, somehow bypassing all of Fentonwork’s protections against ghost incursions to snatch up new tech as soon as the inventors set it down, but this was the first time Jack or Maddie had actually spotted him doing it.
Phantom blinked as if surprised that he was visible. Man, Jack thought, this Wail Flail is going to be a game-changer.
Jack leveled his ecto-blaster, if not directly at the thieving ghost, at least in his general vicinity. “I’ve caught ya red-handed.”
“Green-handed,” Phantom corrected, holding up his ectoplasm-smudged gloves and grinning a bit more weakly than usual.
“Ha!” That was a good one. Jack would have to remember it.
“Well, I didn’t mean to crash your party,” Phantom went on. He looked … fainter than he usually did, dimmer, aside from the unusually bright ring of his suit collar. Jack squinted. Actually, was that just the ghost’s suit collar, or was there something on his neck? “So I guess I’ll take off!” He lifted off the ground and got about halfway to the ceiling before crashing suddenly back to the floor. “What, no more flight, either?” he muttered.
Phantom flickered for a moment — not his usual blink out of visibility but rather fuzzing into a blur before snapping mostly into focus again, now dripping ectoplasm — and a chill ran down Jack’s spine. He’d seen that before, more than a year ago, with a blob ghost that they’d held as a test subject for too long without letting it recharge in the Ghost Zone. The condensed ectoplasm of its core had eventually weakened to the point that the core had lost its structural integrity, and a few moments after the ghost dissolved, the remaining spectral energy had given up on trying to recondense around the absent core and had blown up a quarter of the lab. “Like a tiny supernova,” Danny had said, pale, when he’d been told what had happened. And that had been a little class-one ghost, not a class-seven like the ghost now kneeling on the Fenton lab floor.
“Don’t destabilize,” Jack nervously advised Phantom.
“Yeah, trying not to,” Phantom mumbled back.
Jack hastily disconnected the power source of the Wail Flail, but that didn’t seem to have any effect. He got up and walked over to the ghost, leaving his ecto-blaster on the table. As far as one-on-one interactions went, there wasn’t much to fear from Phantom. Jack and Maddie had figured out last year that the ghost’s driving obsession was heroism, which, while still dangerous in that it remained unknown just how much of a hand Phantom had in causing the various disasters that provided him opportunities for heroics, at least meant that Phantom wouldn’t let people in his vicinity come to harm if he could help it.
Phantom didn’t look up as Jack knelt in front of him. “What’s that on your neck?” Jack asked with a nod towards the glowing collar. It seemed to brighten by the moment while Phantom dimmed.
“Gift from the Guys in White,” the ghost explained, his voice faint enough that it took Jack a moment to make out his words through the ever-present echo effect in ghosts’ voices.
Jack paused. “They’re back in Amity Park?” Did he need to report that to Vlad’s office?
Phantom shook his head. “No. I … went out. Pretty stupid. Thought they’d stopped, though.”
Stopped hunting him, Jack supposed he meant. The GIW’s last operation in Amity Park had been devoted entirely to capturing Phantom; they’d failed in their mission but had succeeded in endangering a significant portion of Danny’s sophomore class, which had ended in Pamela Manson paying for scathing editorials about the GIW in every local news outlet and in Vlad pushing through a proposal to make Amity Park a sanctuary city from the GIW. Jack still wasn’t sure how he felt about the latter. He knew that his wife and daughter both heartily approved of the legislation, if for different reasons — keeping the GIW from getting in the way of the Fentons’ work versus making a gesture towards desiring better relations with the ghosts around town, as if ghosts would understand or care about such gestures — and he himself had felt proud when Vlad had cited the prowess of Amity Park’s own ghost hunters while signing the new law. He still felt that his childhood heroes were being treated unfairly in the matter, though, and knowing that he and Maddie could never call the GIW to town for backup was unsettling.
Phantom buckled forward, and Jack reached out to steady him. If the collar was draining him, it was probably doing it at a constant rate, but it might now be down to the last dregs of his strength. Jack moved his hand towards the collar, but Phantom caught his wrist. “They didn’t touch it without really thick gloves,” Phantom told him. “You probably shouldn’t either.”
Jack went to fetch a far thicker pair of hazmat gloves than his flexible everyday gloves. While he was at it, he grabbed several handheld cutting, soldering, and prying tools that had been coated in ectophobic paint. If the collar had had an obvious release mechanism, the ghost would likely have found it already. Designing something like that without an emergency off-switch or release seemed irresponsible to Jack, but maybe other ecto-engineers’ inventions didn’t explode with quite the same regularity that Jack’s tended to.
Phantom was curled up sideways on the floor by the time Jack returned. His eyes were still half-open, but they gave off only a faint luminescence compared to their usual bright light. He didn’t protest as Jack turned him this way and that to access different parts of the collar. The chill of the ghost’s aura reached through the thick gloves to Jack’s skin, but the ghost’s body itself, once Jack gripped hard enough for it to feel solid, was warmer than he had expected.
It took Jack about ten minutes to break the collar open at the weak point of the port on its back. Phantom flickered only once, squeezing his fists in concentration as he held onto his solidity. He was sitting slumped and faced away from Jack when Jack finally wrenched the device free and tossed it aside, and Phantom gasped and collapsed backward, his back hitting Jack’s chest and his head falling to rest against Jack’s shoulder.
Jack instinctively wrapped his arms around the little ghost. Phantom, evidently exhausted, curled into the unthinking embrace. That response felt … odd, confiding, like a lion cub had decided to curl up in Jack’s lap. In the drained state he was in, the ghost’s behavior ought be more instinctive than calculated. Huh.
Phantom’s aura had stopped fading, but it didn’t strengthen as Jack held him. Right. The ghost still needed an influx of energy to stabilize. Jack could always flush him into the Ghost Zone, but he wasn’t sure that would be enough, nor that no other ghost who found a weakened Phantom right next to the portal would decide to finish him off. A destabilization explosion on either side of the portal would be bad for the portal’s structural integrity.
And anyway, Jack sort of … wanted to know what became of Phantom. The Fentons and the little hero ghost had been sparring, and sometimes working together when the situation demanded it, for coming up on two years, and Jack had never had an easy time letting go of people. Not that the ghost was a person, exactly. He was just … an aspect of life in Amity Park that had grown comfortingly familiar.
Jack scooped the arm that wasn’t supporting Phantom’s head under the ghost’s knees, picked him up, and carried him to the main containment chamber, heedless of the dripping ectoplasm. Phantom’s eyes flickered open when Jack flushed the chamber empty. “I’m going to get a flow of spectral energy from the Ghost Zone going in here,” Jack explained. “It should help stabilize you.”
“Mm,” Phantom acknowledged. The sound was more echo than voice. His eyes closed again.
Jack knelt to lay Phantom out on the containment chamber’s floor. He paused, biting his lip, then pulled a sleeping bag pill from his utility belt and expanded it. Phantom yawned as Jack transferred him into the sleeping bag. There was a built-in pillow, and the ghost’s white hair, blurring at the edges as it always did, seemed to dissolve into the pillow itself.
Jack left him there and closed the containment chamber so that he could safely start the flow of spectral energy. He checked on the chamber’s readings as he did. The amount of spectral energy radiating out of Phantom himself was … terrifyingly low. Still high enough that the ghost could have fought Jack off and made a break for it once he was free of the collar, if only just, but certainly too low for him to be operating on more than the most basic impulses of his obsession.
Once Jack was sure that spectral energy was flowing into the main containment chamber at a steady rate, he went to pick the collar up and stuffed it into a portable containment cube so that he could take the unwieldy gloves off. He looked back at Phantom as he did. The ghost’s aura was … maybe slightly brighter than before? It was difficult to tell through the distortion of the containment chamber’s walls.
Is absorbing the spectral energy around him going to be enough? Jack didn’t know. He was the engineer of the duo, although Maddie was certainly no slouch at engineering herself; he didn’t know any more about ectobiology than he had to in order to design weapons and containment devices.
“Maddie!” Jack called. All the way upstairs and asleep, his wife probably couldn’t hear him. He took a step towards the stairs and paused, glancing back. Phantom hadn’t moved yet, but if the ghost pulled one of his disappearing acts or started destabilizing again while no one was watching, then Jack wouldn’t be able to … He actually wasn’t sure what he might be able to do besides suck the ghost into a Fenton Thermos and hope that Phantom wouldn’t be even less stable upon release.
He pulled out his cell phone.
Maddie didn’t pick up until the second call. She must have been sleeping with her earplugs in. “Jack?” she murmured muzzily into the phone. “What ‘s it?”
“Can you come down to the lab, Mads?” Jack asked. “I’ve got Phantom in the containment chamber and —”
“You’ve caught Phantom?!” The sleepiness in Maddie’s voice was suddenly replaced with excitement.
Jack paused. “Caught” was maybe a strong word for what had happened. But he did, he realized, now have Amity Park’s most elusive ghost locked securely in their containment chamber, with no immediate crisis to demand that he be let back out.
“He was trying to steal more of our stuff. He’s not doing too great, though.” Jack could see a faint green stain beginning to seep out from under the sleeping bag.
“I’ll be right down.” Maddie hung up.
She must have meant the “right,” because she appeared in the lab not even a minute later, still dressed in her pajamas, a notebook clutched to her chest. She beamed when she saw the apparently-sleeping figure in the containment chamber and stood on her tiptoes to kiss Jack’s cheek.
“I married the world’s best ghost hunter,” Maddie told him.
“Ha! Fat chance of that, Maddie; they wouldn’t let you marry yourself! I’m glad you settled for second-best, though.”
That earned him a second peck on the cheek before Maddie let her focus shift fully to the ghost in the containment chamber. “Is that a sleeping bag?” she asked.
“Yeah, his spectral energy’s really low. I’ve got some flowing into that chamber from the portal, but I don’t know if it’ll be enough to stabilize him.”
“It might be for a lower-class ghost, but I don’t know about for him.” She crouched in front of the containment chamber’s wall. “He spends so little time in the Ghost Zone compared to the others; he must be fueling himself some other way. Hey, Phantom?” She raised her voice and started knocking on the clear ectophobic wall.
The ghost shifted deeper into the sleeping bag when the knocking started and then, as it continued, poked his head out and blearily rubbed his eyes at Maddie, looking like nothing so much as a rumpled teenager.
“Hi, Phantom,” Maddie said loudly enough to be sure the sound permeated the containment chamber’s walls. “Your spectral energy’s too low right now. Do you know what would stabilize you?”
The ghost blinked a few times, either processing the question or processing that it was a question, before he answered, “Ecto-dejecto,” pointing a finger towards the cabinet he’d failed to reach into earlier.
Ecto-dejecto? That was odd; Jack had made that to de-stabilize ghosts slowly enough to avoid an explosion, although its effect had proved to be rather the opposite —
“Ah!” Jack said, enlightened. He dashed to the chemical cabinet.
“Careful!” Phantom called after him, halting him for just long enough to recall the earlier crashing noise of containers falling over from Phantom’s failed attempt to get to the ecto-dejecto. Jack stopped and pulled back on the extra-thick gloves before opening the cabinet doors.
There wasn’t too much of a spill, thankfully, and no explosions, and the ecto-dejecto appeared to be unharmed, if in lower supply than Jack had expected. This probably hadn’t been Phantom’s first time using it. Jack tossed a chemical absorption pad onto the floor to catch any of the spill that dripped down and took out a glass bottle of ecto-dejecto. Maddie had already pulled on lab gloves and fetched a syringe.
“Should I turn off the flow from the portal?” Jack asked. The spectral energy readings from the containment chamber weren’t nearly high enough to hurt anyone if they opened the door, but every once in a rare while a ghost would get sucked into the chamber alongside the spectral energy. Usually the Cardboard Creep, who seemed fond of the containment chamber’s cubic shape.
“No need; if he knows how the ecto-dejecto works, he should be able to apply it himself if we give it to him through the thermos port.” Maddie finished filling the syringe, capped it, and placed it in an inactive Fenton Thermos as she spoke. She stuck the Thermos to the compatible port on the containment chamber wall. “Ready to catch, Phantom?” she asked with her finger on the “Release” button.
Jack sometimes had a hard time reading the facial expressions of people outside his family, but he’d never struggled with the expressions Phantom pantomimed. The ghost’s face appeared puzzled for a moment, and then his eyes went fear-wide. His gaze searched the containment chamber as if it had only belatedly occurred to him as well that he was trapped. He flickered into a blur. The green puddle under the sleeping bag expanded.
“Phantom!” Maddie cried, pressing down on the button to propel the syringe of ecto-dejecto into the chamber. The ghost resolidified in time to catch it and depress the plunger into his arm. His form shivered at the application, then blurred again, then abruptly snapped into focus with more definition than Jack could ever remember seeing before. It took a great deal of energy for a ghost to render its features that distinct, and most rarely bothered.
Jack felt a pang of familiarity staring at Phantom’s face, but the edges of the ghost’s form took on their usual blurriness again before he could place it.
Phantom’s aura looked noticeably brighter than it had been before the ecto-dejecto. The ghost was floating now, dangling his boots about a foot off the ground, and no longer dripping ectoplasm. Maddie sighed in relief. Jack felt his shoulders go slack with the same sentiment.
As the Fentons watched, Phantom drifted back to the far wall of the containment chamber, stopping just before he hit the wall and folding his arms over his chest. His form remained solid.
Maddie turned her notebook to a fresh page and started writing. “Jack,” she asked, “can you shut off the energy from the portal now and set the chamber’s readings to record? We should see how much of the ambient spectral energy he absorbs.”
Jack did as Maddie asked. The computer beeped twice in acknowledgement.
“Soooo,” Phantom said slowly, his voice now strong enough to be clearly heard through the echoing. “The odds of you guys calling it a night and flushing me back into the Ghost Zone once you’re sure I’m not destabilizing are …?”
Maddie and Jack looked up to stare at him. They didn’t reply, which should be reply enough.
“How about if I say please?” Phantom prompted.
Maddie shook her head.
“Pretty please with a cherry on top?”
“Phantom,” said Maddie, smiling slightly, “did you really think we’d never catch you stealing our stuff?”
“Hey, I’m only using it for ghost hunting!” Phantom protested. “You guys share it around to ghost hunters anyway! I can’t pay you in cash, but I always charge your ecto-batteries.”
Maddie shook her head again. “The ecto-batteries charge up from being near the portal.”
“There’s not enough energy lying around to charge them that way!”
“Uh, Mads,” Jack put in, thinking back to his repeated failure to measure how long it took an ecto-battery to charge, because they all seemed to reach full charge in batches regardless of when they’d begun charging. “That checks out, actually.”
“Oh? Oooh.” Maddie scribbled another line in her notebook. “Maybe we can wire some sensors onto him and convince him to charge one to see how it works.” Although convincing a ghost to use its powers on command was far easier said than done.
The ghost in question groaned and put his head in his hands. “You guys always know just how to make a bad day worse, don’t you? Wasn’t two nightmare scenarios enough for one night?”
Jack felt a twinge of guilt, like from tricking a cat into a travel carrier. He and Maddie seemed to play the part of “annoying allies” most of the time in Phantom’s playing-at-hero view of the world, which, considering that the Fentons were the ghost boy’s unwilling suppliers of everything from battle weaponry down to his suit (Jack would admit to feeling some pride in the fact that not even a class-seven ghost had been able to make or find a suit with a better balance of maneuverability, comfort, and protection against ectoblasts than a Fenton Jumpsuit), certainly made sense. It was no betrayal for the Fentons to act otherwise, though. They’d never agreed to their role in his obsession.
Phantom sank to the floor with a sigh at Jack and Maddie’s lack of response. “Please tell me you were at least serious about the ‘no dissection over complexity class two’ thing,” he said. “I’d really rather my molecules stay where they are, thanks.”
“Of course,” said Maddie, looking up in surprise from the notes she was taking on the ghost’s behavior. She and Jack had had to write out a list of ethics guidelines after an Amity Park News report on their ectobiology papers had led to an outcry among the portion of the population who backed Phantom or Ember McLain or the tourist industry that promised to reconnect visitors with the ghosts of lost loved ones (how that industry was still afloat when the vast majority of deaths never sparked the formation of a ghost, Jack had no idea, but at least it produced a steady demand for Fenton Ghost Gabbers). Most of the ethics guidelines were silly, as the Fentons had yet to discover any means by which ghosts could experience pain, but there was enough evidence of ghosts having something like consciousness now to genuinely warrant guidelines on procedures that might terminate consciousness, at least until the mechanism behind it was better understood. There were exceptions in the guidelines made for ghosts that were causing clear and present danger to human life, but the public was hardly going to approve of such an exception’s being applied to Phantom.
“Great.” Phantom leaned his head back against the containment chamber’s wall.
Maddie returned to writing notes. “You may be an imprinted simulation of conscious experience running on charged ectoplasm, but that’s still a working theory,” she said. They still needed a better understanding of the mechanism by which ghosts developed plans to satisfy the obsessions that held them together. They knew that ectons responded to and carried emotional energy in much the same way that electrons responded to and carried electricity, but the circuitry, so to speak, of ghosts remained unclear. “And we Fentons keep our word.”
“Yeah,” Phantom sighed. “Family trait.”
Maddie turned her head. “Jack, what do the spectral energy readings look like?”
Jack looked away from the ghost to check the computer. “Stable now. Huh, they spiked a few seconds after I turned off the influx from the portal. Was that some kind of delayed reaction to the ecto-dejecto?”
“Interesting,” said Maddie, making a note. “Worth looking into. Is he stable enough for sampling now?”
“Looks like.”
The ghost in the containment chamber shivered.
Jack hesitated, staring at Phantom. Nothing the Fentons were planning to do would harm the ghost, of course — not with those rapid-regeneration abilities they’d documented from his fights — but ghosts rarely responded well to confinement. If one were to go with the increasingly popular analogy of ghosts being like dangerous wildlife, then Jack supposed trapping a ghost in one spot would be analogous to trapping a nocturnal animal in broad daylight with no cover. Maybe Phantom was dreading being confined to a lab table rather than just to the comparatively spacious containment chamber.
“Here, Maddie, have you got the sampling kit?” Jack asked, scratching his chin. “I have an idea.”
Maddie, halfway to the closet where some of their spare jumpsuits were stored, paused. “What is it?”
“We can do the sampling in there, yeah? And then we won’t be stuck smelling that knockout gas all week.” There was a downside to ghosts’ weakness to foul scents.
Maddie thought it over. She glanced at their scowling but thus far unaggressive research subject. “Well, alright; we can try. Let me get changed.”
Jack grinned at her. She smiled back before stepping into the closet.
Phantom was still sitting with his knees curled up and his head leaned against the far containment chamber wall when Jack lined up in front of the door with Maddie behind him, a Fenton Thermos in her hand. Either of them could take ectoplasm and membrane samples, but Maddie was the better shot. Phantom just stared resignedly at the ceiling and didn’t try to move as Jack stepped in and Maddie shut the door again behind him.
Jack could feel a buzz from the high level of ambient spectral energy in the chamber. He hopped over the empty, ectoplasm-stained sleeping bag, hoisting the kit of sampling supplies high. The ectoplasm stains could be analyzed if needed, but clean, uncontaminated samples would serve them far better.
“Alright, spook,” said Jack, crouching in front of the ghost, “I need five vials of ectoplasm and three membrane samples. Want to do this the easy way?”
Phantom shrugged. “Fine, whatever.”
“Attaboy.” Jack settled himself on the ground — maybe he should have brought in chairs — and laid out the vials, sampling needle, and syringe. “Here, you can lean against me if you want,” he offered. It wouldn’t make his work that much more difficult, and it had seemed to comfort Phantom before.
Phantom’s eyes flashed. Jack squinted against the green glare. “Why would I want that?” asked the ghost.
Jack frowned. “Well, you did it earlier —”
“And look where that got me,” Phantom interrupted bitterly.
The tricked-a-cat-into-a-carrier guilt returned in such force that Jack nearly protested that he hadn’t been thinking of containing Phantom when he’d put him in here, only of keeping him stable, not that his intentions at the time made much difference now. He’d never felt quite so wrong-footed when dealing with a ghost before. He would normally chalk the feeling up to Phantom’s trying to mess with his head, but the ghost had been so devastatingly low on energy earlier and still showed signs of exhaustion, which ghosts normally tried to hide. Jack had a hard time believing he was pulling any elaborate tricks.
Phantom turned his face away. He didn’t look back while he unvelcroed his right glove from his suit, pulled it off, pushed his sleeve up past his elbow, and offered Jack his arm. “Just aim for a vein, please,” he said.
The ghost’s arm was startlingly detailed. It was common for ghosts with complex forms to generate some manner of skeletal and muscular structure, but Jack had never seen veins on one before, nor wrinkles and freckles and arm hair. He took Phantom’s elbow gently and swabbed the inner side with disinfectant. Phantom looked back when Jack stuck the needle into the widest vein, then looked away again.
The green ectoplasm drawn into the sampling vials was less gooey than ectoplasm usually was. A drop of it beaded on the ghost’s skin when Jack withdrew the needle, acting so much like blood that Jack pulled a band-aid from his supply belt and applied it over the puncture. He rubbed a circle on the ghost’s skin in comfort. Phantom blinked down at Jack’s thumb and the glow-in-the-dark stars adorning the band-aid — Jack hadn’t yet run through his stock from back when Danny had been scraping his knees on every surface in sight — and a clear, faintly glowing liquid started dripping down his cheeks.
Jack stared. Hey, ghost tears! Let me swab a sample! was probably not the right response for the situation. “Uh,” he offered instead.
Phantom finally looked up from the band-aid and pulled his arm out of Jack’s grip.
“Phantom?” Maddie’s anxious, muffled voice came through the chamber walls. Jack turned to see her shielding her eyes to peer in at them. “Are you destabilizing again?”
“No, Mo— Maddie,” Phantom answered. He dried his face with his gloved hand.
Jack exchanged a glance with his wife. She looked as confused as he felt. Ghosts’ gestures and expressions were tools of communication, nothing more. They’d never seen a ghost cry before and had no idea what it might mean when the ghost in question was unharmed. Unless — “Are you hurt?” Jack asked. Phantom had seemed stable, but maybe being drained nearly dry had had other effects besides endangering his stability.
“No, I’m. Sorry; you reminded me of … someone.”
Jack frowned. “Someone you miss?”
“Ha. You could say that.” Phantom smiled as if at a private joke.
“Well, uh …” Jack scratched the back of his neck. The ghost probably wasn’t trying to signal any desire for a hug, judging by his earlier words. Nor for fudge, since ghosts didn’t need to eat in the Real World. “Do you … need a moment?”
Phantom looked up and met his eyes. Jack had to look away after a second to protect his retinas from the ghost’s ocular glow. When he looked back, Phantom was staring down at the band-aid again.
The ghost grimaced. “Right. Look,” he said, “I’m tired, it’s I-don’t-even-want-to-know how early in the morning, and the easiest way to bust out of here would probably wreck half the lab, so could you just finish up with your samples and let me go already?”
Jack’s eyes widened and met Maddie’s. He didn’t think it was an idle threat, and from the looks of it, neither did she. Phantom was elusive for more reasons than just being difficult to catch: given enough time, he could blast his way out of any bonds, bypass any ghost shield (Jack had no idea how the ghost managed that; he would have sworn the shields were impervious), and had once even vanished from a Fenton Thermos (Jack wasn’t sure how he’d managed that one, either. All that Jazz, who’d been holding onto the Thermos at the time, had been able to tell him was that the Thermos had been full one moment and empty the next).
Jack and Maddie had a duty as deputized Amity Park ghost hunters to hold Phantom for as long as they could. Technically. “Half” was rather a lot of lab to repair. Also, no one had spoken out against the Red Huntress’s forging an alliance with Phantom months ago except for Vlad and a few property insurance companies. Most of the town seemed to believe either that Phantom’s explanations on Action News about an overshadowing epidemic in City Hall and a circus ringmaster with a ghost-controlling orb were truthful or that the ghost’s most destructive early days had passed as he’d settled into his hero obsession.
Maddie tapped her pen against her chin in thought. “I want to take electrogram measurements on how you charge an ecto-battery,” she said at last. “If you cooperate with that, then, yes.”
Jack grinned wide, struck by his wife’s brilliance. They really couldn’t have managed that test without Phantom’s cooperation, but with it was another story. He was still astonished some days that someone so clever and beautiful had married him. He truly was the luckiest man in the world.
Phantom scowled again, but his shoulders relaxed. “Alright,” he agreed.
Maddie prepped the electrodes while Jack finished taking samples of skin — membrane — well, it looked a lot like skin in Phantom’s case, and the punch biopsy tool Jack was using was technically designed for skin anyway, so he might as well think of it as skin — and storing them in neutralized ectoplasm. Interestingly, the samples seemed more solid once outside of the ghost’s aura, as if the concentrated ghostly energy was phasing them slightly out of tangibility rather than forcing volatile ectoplasm to maintain a solid form.
The ghost yanked his sleeve back down over the array of star band-aids when Jack was done. Maddie opened the containment chamber door and beckoned them both out. When she asked Phantom to take his jumpsuit off to the waist so she could apply electrodes near the center of his ghost core, he hesitated.
“You agreed,” Maddie reminded him, gently.
Phantom grimaced. “Yeah, I know, I keep my word,” he said, echoing Maddie’s earlier statement. He sighed. “Just … don’t ask about the scars, okay? Or the pecs.”
Ghosts get scars? thought Jack.
“Okay,” said Maddie.
Phantom took off his gloves and pulled the jumpsuit down to his waist. As soon as the left glove was off, Jack caught sight of a branching green mass of lines on the ghost’s palm. It ran up his arm and then down his larger-than-expected chest and his abdomen in one main thick line with countless smaller lines bifurcating off of it, like streams converging into a river, or like the veins of a leaf, or like lightning.
Jack opened his mouth to ask how the scar had formed and Maddie immediately slapped her hand over it. Phantom shot her a grateful smirk.
Applying the measurement electrodes took far less time than Jack had expected. Having a willing, if grudging, subject made the work significantly easier. Jack managed to rustle up four ecto-batteries in need of charging, and Maddie had Phantom charge the first two in succession, then the last two both at once, “Ooh”-ing at the electrogram readouts each time. Even Jack, less well-trained in electrograms, could track on the readouts the energy pulses that originated from the central core around Phantom’s navel and ran through his arms down to the batteries.
“Can you do a few ectoblasts next?” Maddie asked excitedly when the ghost set the last charged battery down with a yawn.
Phantom frowned and looked like he was about to remind them that that wasn’t part of their deal when his eye caught on the nearby lab bench. “Actually, yeah,” he said. “Hand me that, though.”
“What, this?” Maddie picked up the portable containment cube with the broken GIW collar inside. She frowned. Phantom took it in his own hands and stepped out in front of her and Jack. “What is —?” Maddie started to ask but was cut off by Phantom tossing the cube into the air before them and slamming it with three rapid-fire ectoblasts.
The containment cube and the collar within both burst into flaming pieces. Phantom threw an ectoshield up in front of them as the pieces fell.
“There you go,” said the ghost, dusting his hands and smiling. “Plenty of data on ectobla—”
One of the flaming pieces hit the green-stained chemical absorption pad on the floor. The pad exploded.
“Aw, fu…dge,” said Phantom, dropping his shield and shooting ice at the fire. He phased out of the electrodes and ran to the Fenton’s chemical cleanup supplies. The electrodes fell to the floor in a heap. Phantom grabbed the largest chemical absorption mat, threw it over the icy mess on the floor, and then iced the whole thing over again. “Please tell me nothing in this cabinet explodes on contact with liquid water.”
Jack and Maddie mutely shook their heads.
“Great.” The ghost flew back to the cleanup supplies to fetch a long, tubular absorbent boom.
“How’d you learn lab safety rules?” Jack asked as he watched the ghost lay the boom in a circle around the ice so that it would absorb any bits of melted chemical solution that escaped the pad and the mat.
“The hard way,” Phantom grumbled. He cleared his throat, rubbing his eyes with the base of his palm. “Anyway. This should be safe for right now, and we’re … uh. Yeah. Well. G’night, then.” The ghost vanished.
“Huh! He usually has a snappier parting phrase than that,” Jack commented. His wife didn’t respond. “Maddie?”
“Mm?” she asked. Jack turned to see her frantically scribbling in her notebook. She looked up at him with a gleam in her eye. “Jack, do you realize we just got electrogram data on Phantom’s ectoblasts, ectoshields, ice, and intangibility? Well, at least until the electrodes fell through him,” she amended for the latter.
“Alright!” said Jack, grinning.
“And the ectoplasm and membrane samples and a new way of charging ecto-batteries … There might be three whole papers in this!”
“How about that! We should catch that spook stealing our stuff more often!”
Maddie smiled back at him, then bit her lip. “Do you know why he was in such bad shape?” she asked him, sounding far more hesitant than he was used to from her.
“Ah.” Jack grimaced as the memory of Phantom curled up on the floor of the lab and oozing ectoplasm sprang unbidden to his mind. “Run-in with the Guys in White, apparently.”
“They’re back in Amity Park?” exclaimed Maddie.
“No, he said he went out. Guess they’re still after him, though.”
Maddie tapped her pen against her chin.
“What is it, Mads?” Jack asked, dragging himself out of his own thoughts and taking in his wife’s troubled expression.
Slowly, she told him, “I doubt we can be the ghost hunters Amity Park needs for much longer if a ghost being hurt bothers us this much.”
“It bothered you, too, huh?” said Jack, his voice dropping. He supposed it had been obvious that he’d been bothered. He’d never much thought about losing Phantom before tonight, about the ghost’s being not just diminished and contained but gone, and he didn’t like that that was possible. Phantom was the first ghost Jack had ever seen and remained one of the most fascinating of their adversaries.
Maddie nodded, her gaze distant. “We’ve never seen him like that before. I wanted to hug him, almost.”
“I did that before you got down.”
“What?” Maddie blinked at him, then clicked her pen open and held up her notebook. “How did he react?”
“Curled against me like a kitten.” Or like Jack had always assumed a kitten who genuinely liked him would, anyway. Cats tended not to like him as much as dogs did. Or as much as ghosts did, apparently.
“That’s … odd.”
“You’re telling me!”
“His energy was so low he could barely hold his form together, let alone …”
“Yeah.” Jack shook his head. All of the Fentons’ research thus far suggested that a ghost’s capacity for higher-level planning and trickery depended on its power level, and Phantom had been nearly down to the power level of a blob ghost at the time.
Maddie was still frowning into the middle distance when Jack looked up. He nudged her shoulder. “Well,” he said, giving her a smile, “it’s a good thing we’re scientists, yeah? We’ve got data, and we know how to make it give us answers!”
Maddie smiled back. Her shoulders relaxed, and he rubbed them for her, feeling a surge of pride. “Sometimes you know just what to say, don’t you?” she said.
“Even my aim is true once in a while!” He grinned.
“I love you, Jack.” She leaned against him.
“Love you too, Maddie.”
“Let’s get some sleep, hm?”
“Sounds good,” Jack agreed, finally feeling the exhaustion of the long night settle into his bones. He turned them towards the stairs and flicked off the main lab lights. “I’ll bet even that ghost is too tired to be a menace right now. We’ll have quite the story to tell the kids when they get home tomorrow, eh?”
Maddie yawned. “We sure will.”