Takes place near the Elmerton/Amity Park border. Told from Valerie's POV

PP never happened

"What's your real name?" It felt weird that I knew almost nothing about the half-ghost I risked my life trying to save two months prior.

Dani looked on to me, her eyebrows netted with confusion.

I remembered the first time we met in that alleyway. She was melting. What's more, she's half-ghost, half-human: the first one I'd ever seen. I could tell she had a complicated past, and that this was going to be an emotional conversation. I mustered up a slight smile and chuckled. "I mean, there's no way you and Phantom really have the same name, right?"

"I'm a lab experiment gone wrong." One look at my face was all Dani needed to realize I wasn't sure what she meant. "Plasmius created me trying to make a second Danny. I'm only Dani because I was the first clone that was self-aware." Her voice started to falter as tears built up around her eyes. "To make me feel like I meant something to him so I would follow him without questioning him."

My eyes widened. This girl...

I looked off into the distance at the modern landscape looming below us. A lot had changed since that run-in with Vlad. The bank had been integrated into the repair shop across the street, and there was a communication tower where the old bank once stood. All the small trees that had adorned the water facility across the street were cut down. The moonlight smoothly caressed the horizon, but wasn't quite enough to completely mask the faint white glow the girl adjacent me gave off.

It was hard to believe that this cheerful little girl lived through worse than I'd been through these past three years in almost half the time. Were all ghosts this emotionally stable? Or was Dani special that way?

I knew what it was like to grow up without a mother, but I at least had a loving father. A father who didn't abandon me, even after finding out I'd been risking my life hunting ghosts behind his back.

Dani didn't have that. Being labeled a failure the moment you're born? Vlad was a one crazed-up fruit loop. I turned back to the half ghost floating beside me. I started to wonder how many more "Dani's" there were cast out in the world, all their energy being sapped away by the simple need of staying alive.

Come to think of it, the only time I saw Phantom was when he was fighting another ghost. Where did he go when he wasn't making the papers? I wondered if he had any secrets or things he'd wanted to tell me, but couldn't because I shot first and asked questions never.

There has to be something I can do to get Dani more in touch with her human side.

I reached into my backpack and pulled out a piece of origami. A rotating tetrahedron. "Here."

Dani looked at the tripod-shaped paper in her hands like it was a ghost...or I guess alien would be the next step up for her. "What...?"

"That's my birthday present to you. It's origami. My dad taught me how to make it when I was your age. Not really sure what ghost gals like, so..."

I pressed into the center of the paper tripod causing it to cave in, turning it into a triangular base with three pyramids propping it up.

Dani's face turned bright red and looked away in an attempt to hide it. "Today's not my birthday. I don't know when my birthday is," she stammered.

"It's today."

"Says who?"

"Says me."

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