Hey guys, I'm back with a somewhat late chapter. But, it's here now, so let's get this show on the road:

Two months later.

"Pick it up, Hartman!" Valerie yelled. I dove over a concrete barrier and came up, an ectoblaster in each hand. The three ghost shaped targets that popped up were blasted into smoldering bits in a flash. Another popped up to my left, and another to my right. I leveled both blasters outward and shot them both at the same time.

One target appeared from the ceiling and began to race along in a zigzag pattern. I raised the blasters upward and fired a shot from each one. The first blast of plasma missed, while the second winged the target. It wasn't enough to destroy it, but it did stop on it's course. I brought up a blaster again and squeezed the trigger to finish it off, but was rewarded with a click and a beep from the weapon. Undaunted, I raised the second blaster, but was rewarded with the same results.

"Think fast, Hartman, seconds matter in the field!" came Valerie's voice. I broke open the blasters, and with a smoothness that only months of practice could bring, loaded new power packs into them and blasted the target into oblivion. Two more came from my left, racing along tracks in the ceiling. I turned on the balls of my feet and blasted them as well.

Standing fully upright again, I gave both blasters a twirl before blowing away the wisps of smoke from the barrels. At the moment, I felt like a badass. Week after week of running the course, and I finally had it down to where I could almost do it in my sleep.

We were in an abandoned warehouse in the docks area of Elmerton. All of the main shipping it seemed had shifted more toward Amity Park proper, so this area had more abandoned space for us to practice in. Valerie had driven out some spirit calling itself the Box Ghost and had taken over this place as a practice course, seeing as how her small apartment offered almost nothing in the way of space for that kind of thing.

"Not bad, you shaved seven seconds off your time," Valerie said as she came over to me, looking at the stopwatch in her hand. She was wearing her usual maroon ghost hunting gear, but was lacking the mask.

"I told you I was getting good at this," I said with a grin as I slid the blasters into the holsters on my hips. Valerie gave me a half smile.

"You did. But don't let this go to your head. The course isn't the same as going up against actual ghosts," she warned.

"I'm gonna have to field test the helmet at some point, Val," I said. It had taken a while, but I had finally convinced Uncle Jack to let me have the Fenton Helm for my own uses. By convinced, I mean I had stolen it from the lab and then distracted him with fudge and ham so that he wouldn't notice it was gone. So far it had paid off and I had at least a basic understanding on how it operated now.

"When you're ready. For now, work on your aim. I want you being able to do one shot, one kill," she said before turning away and grabbing her backpack. I noticed her work uniform contained inside before she zipped it up.

"'Nother double shift at the Nasty Burger?" I asked, earning a cringe from her. It wasn't that long ago when Valerie had been one of the 'In' crowd at Caspar High. Now that her dad had been dropped from head of a security firm to security guard, she'd been forced to sell a lot of her stuff and get a job in order to help support her family. The whole thing was a sore spot for her, and one that caused no shortage of embarrassment. When I'd figured it out about a month ago, she threatened to beat me into the ground if I told anyone.

"No, I got Ned Duty," she replied glumly.

"Ouch." Nasty Ned was the mascot of Nasty Burger, this robot chef looking thing that I couldn't decide was a rip off of Jack in the Box or not. It was something of a local attraction, being both a photo opportunity for families and a punching bag for the football team. This meant that anyone who got stuck with 'Ned Duty' as Valerie had come to call it was in for eight hours of basic torture.

"Heh, yeah, you're telling me," she said.

"It could be worse," I said.

"Did I mention I got stuck with Danny for the Tetslaff project?" This earned a cringe from me. Tetslaff was the school gym/health teacher. I'm also pretty sure her previous job was a drill sergeant, given she was a renowned hard ass when it came to any of the courses she taught. The latest in a long line of stress related assignments was a parental assignment designed to teach child care for a newborn.

Looking back on it, the project was probably the school's way of scaring the students into abstinence. It might have worked too, if it wasn't for the fact that the babies were flower sacks with smiley faces slapped on them instead of actual dolls. Probably from budget cuts or something, that's the excuse teachers are always using anyway.

All the students had been split off into pairs, one boy and one girl. Tucker with Sam, Danny with Valerie, and a girl named Star with me. Star was a blonde haired, blue eyed beauty who was friends with Valerie, pretty much the only one from the popular crowd that still talked to her in fact. She didn't like me in the slightest, given my relation to Danny, and she'd made that clear multiple times since the assignment had begun.

It didn't help that Danny and Valerie still hated each other. They shared a general dislike of each other in public, and usually shot first and asked questions never when it came to their alter egos. I'd tried to get them to come to the peace table a couple of times, but my attempts usually ended in failure. Danny still maintained that he wasn't the ghost kid that Valerie was hunting, and Valerie pretty much had a blood oath to claim Danny's scalp by this point.

"Ew. I kinda get that. I got stuck with Star," I said.

"She's not so bad once she gets to know you," Valerie said, sticking up for her friend.

"Something tells me she doesn't want to get to know me."

"Give her a chance, please? For me?" she asked, flashing those big green eyes of hers. I sighed, but gave her a smile anyway.

"I'll be nice to her, but I can only go so far. She'll have to meet me half way at some point," I said.

"That's all I ask. Now, I gotta get to work, keep up on those targets," she said, and like that she was gone. I shook my head after her, but reset the course and prepared for another run. As much as I chomping at the bit to go out and do a field test, I kind of agreed with her. Having seen first hand how ghosts operated and how powerful they could be, I didn't want to face one until I was absolutely sure I couldn't improve on my performance anymore.

Besides, combat practice gave me two added bonuses. Workout, and time to think. I was no where near being a ripped hunk by any stretch of the imagination, but I was defiantly in much better shape than when I had first arrived in Amity Park. This would only get better with time and effort, and it might land me a girlfriend by the time I graduated.

As I blasted away at targets, I used the time to try and think about my current situation. The whole Danny/Valerie thing was going to have to be put on the back burner for now. They were both simply too stubborn to be able to convince. Unless one side caved and gave up a little ground in good faith, it simply wasn't going to happen. I, frankly, didn't have the means of convincing them.

Valerie and I had gotten close over the past couple of months to be sure, but it was still more of a professional relationship rather than a personal one. She was still a little hesitant about opening up to someone, which given that her just about all of her friends had ditched her when her wealth status had changed, I couldn't blame her.

My relationship with my cousin, on the other hand, was a little...awkward for lack of a better term. Sure, we lived under the same roof, got along great both at home and at school, even hung out every once in a while when we didn't find ourselves busy with extra curricular activities. But there was this underlying frostiness there that stemmed from when I had accused him of being the ghost kid. Even though he had outright denied it, and still maintained that denial, he was very cautious around me. Like with Valerie, I found I couldn't blame him for feeling that way. From his point of view, I was a wild card that had apparently figured out his biggest secret within three days, and now seemed to spend a lot of time with one of his arch rivals.

Personally, I had no intention of ratting out Danny to Valerie. Ghost or not, he was still family, and from what I had seen since I had gotten here, he'd done nothing but try to help against the growing ghost threat. So I had taken steps to try and insure that Valerie didn't find out about Danny's identity. A misleading suggestion here, a tiny bit of sabotage to an experiment there, little things to try and throw her off the scent. I knew that it was only a temporary measure in the long run. Valerie was smart, clever, and determined. It was only a matter of time until she figured out the truth.

But I set all of this to the side. As much as the city would benefit from them working together, neither one was willing to stand down long enough for a talk. Neither one of them really trusted me enough yet for me to try and convince them to do so either. So, my time thinking was better devoted to trying to figure out how to deal with my immediate problem. Namely, Star and this whole flower sack fiasco.

Star was what Tucker had designated as a 'satellite'. Namely, she had the looks, personality, and monetary background to definitely be considered one of the popular crowd, but she wasn't nearly pretty or charismatic enough to be the queen bee. Thus, she was always seen in the head popular girl's orbit, hence the designation. Unfortunately for me, that meant I was grinding my teeth and considering the pros and cons of lobotomy via mechanical pencil every time I got stuck with her in class.

The problem with Star, like most of the other girls in her particular group, was that she was about as deep as a five gallon bucket. Her primary focus was on maintaining her popularity and good looks, with little regard to anything beyond graduation. Although to her credit, she did still maintain a friendship with Valerie, so she wasn't nearly as bad as some of her peers.

Maybe Valerie was right, maybe she wouldn't be as bad if I got to know her.

"You did what now?" I asked. I was standing in the cafeteria, trying to process what had just been told to me without looking like a slack jawed idiot.

"I gave the sack to a babysitting service," Star repeated, not looking up from her small, folding pocket mirror.

"Tetslaff gave the assignment yesterday, where did you find a babysitting service? Who the hell even babysits a sack of flower to begin with?" I asked.

"Oh, your little techno geek friend," she replied, absentmindedly waving a hand in the general direction of Tucker, who was eating with Danny and Sam on the other side of the room.

"I don't think that qualifies," I said.

"Whatever. You wanna get an F, you go right ahead and take that sack for yourself," she said. I shook my head before turning and heading off. There was no point in arguing with someone who didn't care about the conversation to begin with. Instead I headed to the library. They were serving two things for lunch today; ham sandwich, and some ultra vegetarian nightmare they were trying to pass off as food. It was better to wait and just get something when the day ended.

The library was fairly quiet at most times of the day. The few people that were there either had their nose buried in a book or were surfing on the computers. I just found a quiet corner table and plopped down. Usually in my quiet time I just doodled in a journal I kept. Most of it was just random scribbles, an abstract idea that never really took much of a form. But sometimes they molded into something bigger.

There were traces of Tucker, Sam, Danny, and others, usually doing something they enjoyed. Tucker with his PDA, Sam with a protest sign, Danny with a space suit helmet. The one I was currently working on was of Valerie. She wasn't doing anything outlandish or anything like that, just wearing her usual school attire while looking at something out of frame.

I wasn't sure why, but for some reason I was putting more detail into this picture than I usually did. It was kind of like running the course. The more I focused on the drawing, the more I could think and take my mind off of the problems that were bothering me. Star being completely uninterested in the project was probably going to cost us both the assignment.

In fact, looking back on it, she was probably banking on me not wanting to fail in order for us to pass, because I would step up and take over. What Star didn't realize was that I had already taken and passed this class before I transferred. Pretty much the only reason I was still in Tetslaff's class was because the school lacked a stable councilor. I could fail this class with the worst F in Caspar High history, and it wouldn't leave a blemish on my record.

The fact that she had no idea what was coming her way helped to lessen my stress a little. My hope was that it might teach her to step up and take a little responsibility. But, I kind of doubted it. She hadn't even bothered to make eye contact during our conversation. Somehow I doubted that failing a flower sack project would even register on her radar unless it effected her ability to be a cheerleader or something.

"Hey, little cousin." The new voice startled me, causing me to draw a big line straight off the page. I clenched my teeth as I realized what I had done before I set to erasing my mistake.

"What's up, Jazz?" I asked, glancing upward briefly to confirm that's indeed who it was.

"Why aren't you eating lunch? I don't think I've ever seen you pass up the chance to eat," she said.

"They're serving ham sandwiches and literal grass on bread, I've seen better offerings from under the grill at the Nasty Burger," I replied before blowing off some eraser shavings.

"Oh, yeah. That's why I always bag lunch it," she said, holding up a brown sack, "whatchya workin' on?"

"Nothing that will get you into Harvard," I answered, covering the drawing with both hands and sliding the journal away from her. She looked a little hurt and offended at that.

"Oh come on, you can trust me," she said. I gave her a pointed look.

"Jazz, do I go into your room and read your diary?" I asked. Her look turned to one of anger.

"Not if you know what's good for you," she said.

"Then can you do me the courtesy of not looking into my stuff?" I asked.

"It's just a drawing, Will. And besides, art offers windows into the artist's soul," she said.

"I thought those were the eyes."

"Will," she said, glaring at me. I groaned before sliding the journal toward her.

"Fine." Jazz poured over the drawing I had been working on with wide, eager eyes and her usual confident smile.

"You like this girl," she said after several moments of studying it. I cocked my eyebrow at her.

"Uh, yeah? She's probably the closest thing I have to a best friend at this school," I said.

"No, no, no, I mean romantically," she said. That earned a laugh from me.

"I think you need to set the psychology book down for a bit, Jazz."

"I'm serious, Will."

"And so am I. Not everything is a headcase for you to crack. I like her as a friend, nothing more," I said.

"Then why did you put more detail into this drawing than the others?" she asked.

"Cause I have an eye for detail? Not that hard to figure out," I replied before sliding the journal back to myself and resuming the drawing.

"You should talk to her about your feelings, don't let it sit there and fester," Jazz said. I glanced up at her.

"You didn't hear a word I just said, didn't you."

"Burying your feelings isn't healthy, Will. The sooner you get them out into the open, the better you'll feel," she said.

"I'm starting to understand why Danny finds you annoying," I said.

"He said what?" she asked, her eyebrows coming down in an angry fashion.

"Oh, THAT got your attention?"

"That little…after everything I put up with for him, I'M annoying?" she muttered before storming off, presumably to find Danny and give him a piece of her mind. I just shook my head and went back to drawing.

"Christ on a crutch, this family sometimes."

The funny thing about Jazz is that sometimes, despite how annoying she can be with her theories and superiority complex, she gets you to thinking. As I blew the last of the shavings off of the picture and sat back to look at the finished product, I found myself wondering. Did I have feelings for Valerie beyond that of friendship?

Sure she was beautiful. Being a teenage male with a pulse, I would have had to have been blind to have missed that. But there were other aspects about her that I liked besides just looks. She was smart and she had a no nonsense, determined kind of personality. If there was something out there she wanted, sooner or later, by one means or another, it was only a matter of time before Valerie Gray got it.

On top of that, she was absolutely lethal. She possessed a ninth degree black belt, and she was a top notch marksman when it came to ghost hunting. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that she could turn just about anyone in school into a pretzel without breaking a sweat. In my eyes, that made her hot. But romance? I wasn't sure if that was as far as I was willing to go with it just yet.

"Mmm, needs a blaster," I muttered to myself as I looked over my drawing and concluded that what the Valerie in the picture needed was an ectoblaster to seem complete.

As the old saying goes, Karma is a bitch. Turns out, so is Star when something goes so horribly wrong that it threatens her ability to be on the cheerleading squad. Tucker's little business venture, while a great idea on paper, went sideways when his mom turned the flower in the sacks into cookies for a bake sale. I don't know how many cookies she churned out, but it was enough to use up like a hundred pounds of flower, because every, single, sack was used.

Star didn't find this amusing in the slightest. In fact, she ranted and raved at me for an hour on the subject. Never mind that she was the one who handed the sack off to Tucker in the first place, somehow it was my fault. The fact that I was eating a cookie in front of her while she was yelling probably didn't help matters.

"Are you taking this seriously?" she screeched as I bit into a rather large chocolate chip and savored the taste with a smile.

"Nope." Her eyes went wide and filled with fire.

"This could cost me my spot on the cheer squad!"

"Well, maybe you should have thought of that before handing off the project for someone else to do," I said. Star huffed and stomped her foot before storming off. I watched her go for about half a second before heading off as well. I'd seen her and others in her group go and find the jocks of the school before sending them after their targets like they were attack dogs. Right now, she was probably going to find a football player and have them turn me into the ball for the next game. As much as I enjoyed annoying her, I wasn't stupid enough to stay in one place for very long.

Instead I headed to Valerie's place. I hadn't seen her all day, and I figured there was a fifty fifty shot she was either there or at work. Knocking on the door, I was greeted by a Valerie that looked like she had gone three rounds in a cage match. She was bruised and battered, but still on her feet and able to move under her own power.

"What happened to you?" I asked as I slipped into the apartment.

"You will not believe the day I had," she said as she plopped down on the couch.

"If the Nasty Ned shift is treating you this bad, you should probably get a different job," I said, stuffing my hands in my pockets.

"No, no. I got dragged into some ghost dimension with the ghost kid by that hunter guy you saw when we first met," she said. I blinked and looked at her like I was an owl.

"I'm sorry, come again?"

"Yeah. I managed to get out with the ghost kid's help. We have a truce of sorts, for now," she said. I blinked again, not quite sure I was believing what I was hearing.

"You mean that guy?" I asked, throwing open her bedroom door and pointing toward the wanted poster on the wall, "the one you've been gunning for this whole time. You and him worked something out?"

"Like I said, you wouldn't believe the kind of day I had," she said. I let out a sigh and ran my hands over my face. Maybe this could be the start of getting them to work together. A cease fire between them was a start at least.

"Wait, did you say 'ghost dimension'?" I asked.

"Yeah. Some kind of spooky, creepy world the ghosts call home," she answered.

"You've been to the other side of the portal," I said in awe, mainly to myself. The portal in the basement at Fenton Works was something in and of itself. While I would like to say that it was usually kept shut, the reality of the matter was that Uncle Jack liked to go ghost fishing a lot of the time, so it was usually a guess at any given time as to whether or not it was actually closed.

"Portal? What Portal?" she asked. I frowned at her.

"You mean, you don't know?" I asked.

"Know what?"

"There's a ghost portal in my aunt and uncle's basement. How did you not know that?" I asked.

"Probably because you didn't tell me until just now. What the hell, Will? Don't you think I should know something like that?" she asked.

"I thought you already knew that," I answered defensively.

"Evidently not! Anything else you're not telling me? Are they hiding the ghost boy under their roof as well?" she demanded. Oh, if only she knew…

"I doubt that. They tend to go with the whole 'rip 'em apart molecule by molecule' route," I answered waving my arms slightly as I impersonated my Uncle.

"Will, that portal is a danger to everyone, including your family," she said.

"You think I don't know that? There's a reason I sleep with a blaster under my pillow," I shot back.

"So why haven't you shut it off yet?" I actually laughed at that.

"Gee, why didn't I think of that? Oh yeah, cause they just turn it back on. If the problem was a simple as throwing a switch, this would have been taken care of months ago," I said.

"We could try sabotaging it," she suggested.

"And risk blowing an entire block sky high? I thought we were the good guys," I replied.

"The police..."

"And tell them what? 'Hey, there's a secret portal in my basement, I swear, please shut it down'? Best case, we get laughed out of the station, worst case, we get padded cells with straight jackets."

"Well then what do you suggest we do, huh? I don't see you coming up with any ideas!" she snapped.

"There's only one thing we can do at this point, Val; we hold the line and send back anything that comes through," I said, picking up and holding one of her blaster pistols to make a point. Valerie looked like she had just watched me grow a second head.

"You and me, just like that?" she asked.

"We know where the epicenter of the ghosts is. If we can't do an outright shut down, the next best thing is containment," I reasoned.

"You and me, against an entire world of ghosts and other sorts of nasty things?" she asked. I twirled the blaster and offered it to her grip first.

"Thought you liked a challenge, Ms. Gray," I said with a smirk. After several moments of silence, she let out a sigh, stood up, and took the weapon being offered to her.

"You have got to be the craziest guy I have ever met," she said. My smirk only widened.

"I'm starting to take that as a complement," I replied.

And cut. That's all for this chapter. We're finally starting to move into the meat and bones of the story, so expect the action and more interesting parts to pick up from here. Remember to read, review, or drop a PM. Let me know what you guys liked or didn't like about this chapter, and I'll see you all next time.