AN: So this is a piece for Dannymay -or is it Phanniemay?- day 4 2020! The prompt was "science!" If you want to see the prompts, just google Dannymay 2020. (Seriously can someone please tell me if it's Dannymay or Phanniemay? I've seen both an don't know which it is.)

Maddie was smarter than most gave her credit for. She'd managed to get Jack through college, after all. She loved Jack dearly, but he had no concept of study habits. Maddie wouldn't exactly call herself the most competent person in ghost hunting, though she definitely was, but she knew enough about ghosts to work her way around a bazooka or two. Or five. After all, she helped to create a portal to another plane of existence! So yes, Maddie liked to think herself as a ghost expert in the very least.

She knew that they were nothing but the remnants of real people, figures that latched onto something in their last moments and obsessed over it for the rest of their afterlife, never fully knowing why. She knew that their bodies were completely composed of ectoplasm, held together by their cores. Their cores worked as their brains, of sorts, though the organ was very simple. Ghosts had no nervous system and didn't feel pain. Their cores also weren't complex enough to form emotions for a ghost themselves, but there was enough intelligence in it for ghosts to be able to understand human emotions. They were master manipulators, who stole everything they could from a person to fulfill their obsession, whether it be their belongings or their life itself. These theories were common knowledge, almost certainly fact. They were things that she'd picked up from books she'd read all the way back in college, and whose concepts had only been proved and reaffirmed in her own studies.

So how was this Phantom going against everything had Maddie ever learned?

The ghost looked absolutely human. Phantom's white hair, glow, and neon green eyes were the only thing that separated it from any teenager that went to her children's school. And that chilled her to the bone, wondering endlessly how someone so young and in the best years of their life had faced a death torturous enough to warrant staying back in the afterlife. It even bled when it got injured in one of its 'fights' for christ's sake! There was no way that a ghost should be able to lose its ectoplasm unless it was dissolving.

The humanity it seemed to possess was the worst thing about the ghost. Whenever it was faced with a ghost hunter that was rightfully trying to bring it down, it insisted on its innocence! It seemed to believe fully that it was doing the right thing, that it was being a hero for the people by fending off its own kind. Phantom cried, breathed and he even tried to make jokes from time to time. The poor thing even complained in the middle of fights, telling its opponents how they had interrupted his day. From studying to eating, to even sleeping Phantom complained. No standard ghost could do those things, and Phantom seemed

to have full faith in every single thing he said, that they were all

needed and not things that had been left over from his normal life and he was still trying to hold onto. He ceaselessly laughed in the face of every theory Maddie and Jack had ever concocted. So Maddie was determined to find out why, even if it meant locking him in her lab until he finally, finally told her why he was so different. Why he seemed to be able to feel both pain and emotions.

So as Maddie pulled on her hazmat suit, filled her pockets to the brim with every weapon she could, and clipped a Fenton Thermos to her belt, she made a resolution. A promise to herself. She would capture Phantom, find out why he was different, and then end his afterlife so the poor creature wouldn't have to suffer anymore. Yes, it was a resolution that Maddie intended to keep. A task that she would carry out until she succeeded.

After all, it was for science.