Hi. Long time no see?

I'm back to having health issues, which gives me a lot of time to sit on the couch. Basically my digestive system is shutting down again - so I'm fixing up old plot ideas on my free time. We'll see how much I get up since I'm exhausted all the time. Not guaranteeing anything.

Warnings for scientifically described gore.

Dissection
A Danny Phantom Fanfic by Cordria

Maddie scowled down at the specimen, still in its containment unit, plotting through the cuts and slices that would properly dissect it. This would be the ninth attempt at this - the first eight had resulted in a oozing puddle of ectoplasm long before she was able to extract its core.

Behind her, someone made a swoshing sound.

Maddie glanced over her shoulder. A ghost was standing there, normal black clothes covered by a protective white lab coat, goggles pushed up into his white hair. He was holding a scalpel like a sword, apparently pretending it was a lightsaber. Maddie let out the smallest of frustrated sighs.

Sooner or later, she would going to figure this odd ghost out. No other ghost she'd ever studied had quite a large range of interests. "You like Star Wars?" she asked.

Danny froze, a green blush coloring his cheeks as he dropped his hand to his side. "No, not really," he muttered.

And there it was again: something he obviously knew about and liked well enough to parody, but refused to claim interest in. Maddie felt the corner of her mouth curl upwards into a smile. If nothing else, it was starting to form a pattern.

"Are you ready?" he asked, His green eyes were alight with interest as he peered at the table. "What are we doing today anyways?"

"I told you," Maddie said, sitting down on a stool and pulling another over for the ghost before she realized Phantom likely didn't need it. In their previous conversations, the ghost had simply floated. "I am trying to isolate a core for study." She kept her tone deliberately light, knowing the next few minutes were going to be very touchy.

All she could do was cross her fingers that this wasn't going to ruin the tenuous trust she had built up in the ghost over the last three months. It was the main reason Jack was off doing something elsewhere today - the young ghost was clearly unsettled around the large man.

"And we need a knife to do it?" Danny said, walking over. "Please tell me you're not planning on dissecting me-" There was a joking tone to his voice up until he saw the small ghost in the container on the table. Then he stopped, face blank.

Maddie watched his face go from blank to confused to angry… then back to blank. "You know I've been attempting to study the cores of ghosts," she said, trying to be as factual as possible and keep her tone bland. "The unique density and pattern of the energy matrix within holds a key to making exponentially more efficient energy storage systems. Batteries that hold perhaps a hundred times more energy without a change in volume. More efficient power generation."

"So…" he glanced back at the little ghost. "So you're going to dissect a ghost."

"I can't," Maddie said slowly. That was her conclusion after the first eight failed attempts. The only way to properly keep the ghost from disintegrating before it's core was isolated was to match its energy outputs perfectly. Despite her best efforts, their computer systems simply weren't fast enough to compensate. However, the last set of tests she'd run on the ghost boy had showed that he could do it instinctively and instantaneously.

He caught on almost instantly. The ghost had a sharp mind for someone so young - and dead. "I'm not dissecting a ghost," he said, backing up a few steps. "Nu-uh. No. That's your particular little idiosyncrasy."

She held out her hand. "Scalpel please."

After a few seconds, mouth caught in a defiant scowl, Danny stepped forwards and handed her the scalpel. "I'm not-"

"Just listen to me," she said, setting the scalpel on the table. "Trust me for a moment."

The frown deepened and he glanced back at the table. His shoulders set.

"Danny." Maddie always felt a tiny shiver run down her spine using her son's name in relation to the ghost. But there was a strange magic in using his name.

The scowl didn't fade, but the ghost's forehead relaxed and his shoulders dropped back down. "Okay," he muttered.

Maddie felt some of the muscles in her abdomen relax. Although she was confident by this point that the ghost wouldn't deliberately harm her, he was incredibly powerful. It wouldn't take much more than an errant thought to cause a lot of damage. "You know something about the benefits that can be reaped if we are able to study and reproduce the matrix of a ghost's core."

He nodded. He should have an understanding of that - one of the main reasons Maddie had started working with the young ghost was to study his core. They'd had several conversations on the topic.

"I have been unable to isolate the properties of a ghost's core in my tests. It's too meshed into the rest of the ghost's structure." Maddie folded her hands in her lap. "There isn't a test I can run to get the data that I need while a core is… contaminated by the rest of the ghost."

The sharp frown on his face softened. His gaze flickered from her to the ghost and back.

"I need to continue this research. For the sake of our world. Both our worlds. We need to figure this out." she glanced at the bulletin boards and whiteboards covering the walls. Everything was covered in theorems and math and graphs and data.

"You forgot to mention the billion-dollar patents," the ghost mumbled.

A small smile curled at the corner of her mouth. "It would set us up for the rest of our lives, yes." It would set up generations of Fentons, if they got their patents correct. "Let us study anything we want." She arched an eyebrow, dangling out the carrot that had worked before. "We wouldn't have to focus on weapons for government contracts."

He blew a sharp breath out of his mouth, ruffling his bangs. His arms left their tense position crossed over his chest and relaxed down to his sides.

Maddie knew she had him. "Remember what happened last time you trusted me?" she leaned forwards, resting her elbows on her knees.

"Yes. You ran tests on me. Like, dozens." The ghost rolled his eyes, but walked forwards and dropped into the stool next to her. "For hours."

"And you're fine. It turned out alright."

"You do want to dissect this ghost, though." Danny twisted around to face the table and poked the container. It tottered for a moment before settling, the ghost inside snarling. "Pretty sure it's going to hurt this ghost."

"Ghosts don't feel pain-"

"I feel pain," he cut in.

Maddie swallowed back several words in response to that. She'd already tried explaining psychosomatic to the young ghost twice - the second time she was pretty sure he'd understood it - and he still insisted it was actual pain he was feeling. It simply wasn't worth the argument right at this moment. "This ghost isn't nearly as complex as you. It doesn't have enough of a neural spectrum to think, much less to feel pain. It's like a lobster. They don't feel pain either."

"Doesn't make dissecting it right," Danny muttered. He crossed his arms and rested them on the table, chin on his arms.

"Perhaps not," Maddie said. "Neither is using rats for study in medical labs, on a similar vein of thought. But the knowledge we gain from medical rats-"

"I know." He sighed.

Maddie waited, quiet. The ghost hadn't actually agreed to do anything just yet. The stool the ghost was sitting on squeaked as he wiggled his foot. "This ghost is getting dissected whether or not you agree to do this." Maddie picked up the container and studied it. "It's going to take me dozens more tries to figure out how to do this right. Or I believe you can do it with one." The creature snarled and manifested claws to smash against the electromagnetic field just inside the glass. "And you keep asking questions about what you're made of. This would be a great way to find out."

The ghost boy stared at her. Then down at the container. He reached out and took it from her, running his fingers slowly over the glass. "Fine," he whispered.

Maddie felt the world unsettle for a moment at that. Curiosity, morality, empathy - all things ghosts couldn't possess. The energy pattern that formed a ghost's 'self' simply wasn't complex enough to hold those ideas. And one certainly shouldn't be able to use those abstract concepts to make a ghost change their thought patterns.

Yet this ghost had them.

"What do I have to do?" he asked.

The tone to his voice made Maddie swallow down a, "Are you sure you want to do this?" She'd barely gotten his agreement, no need to try to talk him back out of it. It would take months - if not years - of work to recreate what he could do in an hour. "Here," she said, taking the containment unit out of his hands.

She dumped the tiny ghost onto the table and activated the shield before it could escape. Carefully changing the settings, Maddie shrank the shield smaller and smaller until the ghost was trapped in place by a shield, spread out on the table, still snarling.

The blank look on Danny's face as it stared at the ghost, spread out on the table, made Maddie hesitate. "Hey," she said, nudging him with an elbow.

He shook himself slightly, blinking up at her and muttering, "Sorry, I just have nightmares about something like this."

"This creature isn't you," Maddie said, ignoring the impossible 'nightmares' comment - ghosts weren't complicated enough to dream. But Maddie had gotten used to the fact that this particular ghost seemed able to understand figurative language instead of just strict literal terms other ghosts used. "It's nothing like you, except in it's basic make-up. You dissecting this ghost is no different than me dissecting a mouse. You're different… species, I suppose."

His mouth scrunched, looking unconvinced, but he didn't get up and leave.

Maddie took that as her cue to move on. She made sure the shield was just barely strong enough to keep the little ghost in place - at his power levels, Danny would barely feel the shield's existence. Hopefully the shield wouldn't affect his ability to keep the specimen stable as it was cut open.

"Alright," Maddie said. She picked up the eco-plated scalpel and held it out. "We're going to need to first identify it's radial markings, and we'll do a series of small cuts along those marks. The central point should be the location of it's core, and we'll be able to peel the ghost open sort of like a banana."

Danny shot her a blank look, but Maddie couldn't identify what it meant.

"So, first things first," Maddie picked up a sensor and held it over the ghost, slowly moving it back and forth like a metal detector. The screen showed slight dips and increases in the power level as she crossed back and forth over one the radials. "Here's a radial - it's one of the main energy conduits in the ghost." She pointed to the spot on the ghost and picked up a permanent marker. "It's important we cut right on the radial, so give me a few minutes and I'll trace it-"

"It's just the brighter lines?" Danny interrupted. He reached past her to trace a slightly curved line across the ghost.

Maddie smiled a little - she should have wondered if they would be visible to other ghosts. This would go much faster than she'd originally planned. "Yes. How many are there?"

"Five." He leaned closer, pointing each of them out. They were spaced out somewhat evenly.

"Then we need to make five cuts," she said. "The specimen is about six inches across, so we're aiming for cuts about an inch and a half long each. About this long." She held up her fingers space apart.

"Okay..."

Maddie waited, but Danny didn't move from his spot, fingers curled tightly around the scalpel's handle. "Come sit right here," she said, situating him in the best spot. "And let's make the first cut."

The ghost stared down at the specimen, slowly reaching out with the scalpel. The tip of the blade quivered and trembled. Then Danny sighed and his hand dropped down to the table. "I just don't want to hurt it. I get that it's a mouse, but the mouse at least would be dead."

She kept the, "it is dead" to herself, and ground her teeth a moment. The ghost's odd ability for empathy was interesting to be sure - but at the moment it was a little frustrating. "I suppose we could try to knock it out somehow," she said. "Hopefully it wouldn't affect the integrity of the core." She shrugged. "Worse comes to worse, we just have to start over again."

Again, the blank look crossed Danny's face that Maddie couldn't identify.

"What?" she asked.

"You…" the ghost trailed off, shaking his head. "You just really don't see ghosts as… worth anything."

"It's just a-" she started.

Danny interrupted. "I get it." He waved his hand, scowling. "Forget it."

Maddie sat back in her stool. "No," she said, "I don't understand what you're on about now. It can't feel pain, Danny. It's dead. We've been over this - it doesn't exist on any sort of level-"

"I do," Danny muttered.

Maddie set her teeth. "You are not the same as this creature," she said. She was trying for gentle, but she was starting to get a bit frustrated. "Just because you think you feel pain doesn't mean this creature does-"

"Like I said, forget it," the ghost said. "You won't understand."

She glanced at the specimen on the table, then up at her young ghost. With a sigh, she decided to drop it for now; it would be a topic for another day. She couldn't afford to have him storm off because of a flawed concept.

"Let's just do this," he said. He wasn't looking in her direction.

Maddie modulated the field holding the specimen in place, allowing for a slight electric current to run through the ghost. It now held perfectly still - although she would classify it more like being frozen in place than 'knocked out'. She didn't mention this to Danny, though. "Better?"

He poked the ghost with a finger, then nodded.

"Here," she said, repositioning the scalpel in his hand. "Cut along one of the radials. About an inch and a half."

There was a few more seconds of hesitation, then Danny set the scalpel gently on the ghost and traced a line. "Sam's going to kill me," he whispered. The slice was barely deeper than a papercut. He drew back, watching the specimen carefully - apparently waiting for it to start screaming in pain. When it didn't move, he visibly relaxed.

Maddie looked at the readouts. With the cut, the ghost had shown a variation in its spectral output of nearly one and a half percent - no doubt a reaction to the damage. But it had quickly stabilized within an acceptable range of its original status. "Good," she whispered, using a tweezers to see if the cut had been deep enough. With a ghost this weak, the 'skin' would be paper-thin. The tweezers were able to grasp the outer layer and peel it back slightly. "Perfect. Four more."

"How come it's not bleeding?"

"Ghosts don't have blood," Maddie said.

"I know, but… you know what I mean. How come it's not… oozing?" Danny leaned closer, the curiosity starting to take over the hesitation in his eyes.

"We're keeping it stabile. The energy output and input are the same, so it doesn't recognize that there's a hole in its skin." Maddie twisted the monitor enough for him to see. "We could completely remove its outer layer, and as long as we keep the energy input stable, it wouldn't… notice."

Danny's mouth twisted. "I would notice."

Maddie smiled, keeping the "no, you wouldn't" to herself. "You're different, remember?"

The ghost was definitely different. But he was still a ghost.

He nodded, and leaned forwards again. This time, the slice was quicker and more confident. With not even the faintest twitch from the specimen, he made the remaining cuts, then set the scalpel down.

The readout on the monitor varied with each cut, twice dropping dangerously close to the 1.618% deviation that would make the ghost catastrophically unstable, but each time the specimen stabilized again. Maddie couldn't contain the grin when the last cut was made, and the ghost was still intact. It's total deviation was only 0.656% - well with the acceptable range for the remainder of her experiment. "Perfect."

"Now," Maddie said, pulling over a computer monitor and setting up a few sensors. "We can peel back that outer layer, and I should be able to get a clear enough view of the energy matrix to locate its core."

She glanced up to see Danny studying the readouts on the monitor. She watched him a moment, then went back to the specimen. She was certain the next few steps could be done by herself - the ghost could stare at the graphs.

Her long, aluminum tweezers poked at the ghost, gently locating the tiny slices and cuts. Grabbing an edge, she peeled it backwards. The 'skin' was like wet toilet paper, the cuticle and ectodermis tearing and ripping with even the smallest bit of resistance. Maddie moved slowly, the scalpel in her other hand teasing at tiny filaments that held the 'skin' to the main body of the ghost.

An alarm chimed. "What's wrong?"

"The yellow line is almost to the red line," the ghost said.

Maddie set down her tweezers and took a step backwards, gritting her teeth and glancing at the monitor. The ghost was at a 1.57% deviation. Even those little touches with the scalpel had been too much. Hopefully without further stimulation, the ghost would stabilize again.

When the yellow line started to climb upwards again, Maddie let out a breath and felt her shoulders relax.

"What's wrong?" Danny asked after a minute. "What happened?"

"Without a perfect balance of its energy input and output, the ghost become unstable. If it crosses that line, the ghost will destabilize permanently." She shook her head and walked back over, sitting back down. "My computers aren't able to adapt the shield output fast enough-"

Danny was looking from the specimen to the computer readouts and back. There was that empty look on his face again. She was losing him again.

Maddie picked up the tweezers and held them out to the ghost. "Please."

He blinked a few times, studied the tweezers, and then slowly picked it out of her hands. "So I have to do it." He twisted the tweezers around, making them gleam in the lights.

"Get to," Maddie corrected, turning back to the specimen and sitting down. "You get to do it. You get to be part of a historic leap forwards in technology that will positively affect both our worlds." She waited a beat, not glancing over her shoulder, and eventually heard the stool scrape on the floor as the ghost sat down next to her. "We just need to finish peeling back the outermost layer."

Danny's body posture was still tense, his shoulders squared.

"Look," Maddie said, pointing with the scalpel but being careful not to touch the ghost. "The outermost layer is a cuticle - an extremely thin layer of 'dead' ectoplasm that no longer can interact on an energetic level. The theory we're going on now is that this cuticle only forms when a ghost is in the human world. Underneath, you see that thin dim layer? That would be the ectodermis, or the ghost's normal skin. This layer has rudimentary structures that seem to act like the vascular system in a starfish, almost like hydraulics, and perhaps allow the ghost to sense and interact with the world."

As expected, the logical, calm recitation of facts calmed the ghost down. Curiosity was making him lean forwards and peer more closely at the specimen.

"When you peel those two thin layers away," Maddie said, leading with her hands. Danny followed with the tweezers, having a much easier time peeling the skin away than she'd had. "See the brightness? That's the ghost's ectophyll - the main structure of the ectoplasm underneath. It's organized into different zones of dense and spongy, with vascular bundles of 'oozy' ectoplasm that runs through it, and the vascular system is organized into radials which all drain back to the core." Maddie traced with her scalpel up to where the cuts merged.

"Weird," Danny whispered. "I thought ghosts were just… oozy on the inside." He peeled back the remaining few portions of the ghost's 'skin' to form an almost pentagon-shaped hole.

"We used to think so too. Since ectoplasm is a pseudoplastic liquid, ghosts are incredibly fragile. The moment you cross a very small percentage of instability, the ghost will simply disintegrate into a liquid. It's nearly impossible to properly study the internal formations-"

He poked at one of the ghost's radials with the end of the tweezers. The alarm started to chime again, and both of them glanced at the computer screen. The yellow line dipped to nearly brushing the red line.

Maddie waited until the alarm stopped. "And on that train of thought, it should be noted nobody has ever gotten this far before. We will need to proceed with caution. I suppose we'll need to be careful to avoid the radials and main vascular bundles…" She trailed off, realizing the ghost wasn't paying any attention. "Danny?"

His eyes narrowed. Then he carefully set the end of the tweezers on a section of the specimen and pressed down. Nothing happened. He picked another section, and again nothing. But when he went to the third location, the yellow line instantly shot down.

"What are you doing?" Maddie said, lurching forwards and snagging the tweezers out of the ghost's hand.

"It's in pain," he said, sounding sort of distant. "We're…. we're hurting it."

"No… we're-"

"That's what the line means. You… when I touch a nerve, the line moves. You're recording how much pain it's in." Danny pointed towards the graph, looking at her with wide eyes. "The red line is how much pain it can take before it dies."

"Ghosts don't have nerves. They don't feel pain," Maddie said firmly, "much less die. We're so close to-"

"Maybe they don't feel pain the same way you do," the ghost said, "but-"

Maddie cut him off with a wave of her hand. Now that the ghost was open, there was a finite time limit to this experiment. They didn't have time to rehash this again. "Fine. We can debate this. I'll listen, I promise you. But right now-"

"We need to let this ghost go."

Maddie stopped. There were sparks flicking between the strands of the ghost's hair, and a tense, cold knot of fear had formed itself in Maddie's chest. The ghost was starting to lose control, and that meant it was getting more dangerous. "No…" The word came out slowly and carefully. "If we release the fields holding this ghost in place, the ghost will disintegrate. All the work we've done would be in-"

"We're torturing it," Danny said. "I… I can't…" He ran a hand through his hair. Static sparks raced over his arm and down to his feet.

"Danny," she whispered. She wanted to take a step forwards and touch his shoulder, but she didn't dare. The ghost was simply too unpredictable. She swallowed and licked her lips. "It's easy to jump to conclusions in data."

When his head flicked up, the almost-human look in his eyes consumed by green, Maddie held up a hand.

"I'm not saying you're wrong," she continued, quiet and barely above a whisper. "I could be the one who is wrong. We'll look at it. We'll talk about it. I promise. Open mind."

There was a slight lowering of the ghost's shoulders.

"But right now, we need to set that aside." She glanced at the specimen on the table. "I need to finish this. The specimen is too damaged to… survive." She mentally winced at using the word 'survive' - it would only feed into the ghost's delusions about life - but it was something they would have to deal with later. "I'll move the red line higher. We'll keep the yellow line as high as we can. We'll assume you're right, and we'll mimizine the ghost's pain. How does that sound?"

The ghost stared at her. Shook his head. But didn't leave. Yet.

"Let's get all the data we need from this one," Maddie coaxed. "Let's not have to start over. I need this ghost's core-"

"No. I can't-"

"One ghost," Maddie whispered. "It's one ghost to change two whole worlds. One little ghost."

"I…" he shook his head. "I can't."

"I can't do this without you." Maddie dared take a small step forwards, keeping eye contact. "I can't. If you leave it'll be a pointless waste, everything you've done so far. We need to-"

The ghost vanished.

Maddie held perfectly still, slowly counting in her mind. Swear words bubbled across her mind, and she kept counting until they died down.

Fifty.

A hundred.

Two hundred.

Then she let out a breath. "Damn it."

Turning slowly back to the specimen strapped to the table, Maddie sat down. There was an almost zero chance she would be able to do this without the ghost's instinctive abilities. But she had to try.

Besides, the worst of it was over at this point - without that dense cuticle and ectodermis in the way, her sensors should be able to send detailed enough readings to her goggles. Should.

Maddie let out a breathless laugh and scrubbed the back of her glove against her forehead. Multiple billion-dollar patents hanging on a should.

With a sigh, she hooked the sensor input into her goggles and pulled them over her eyes. The specimen lept into broken colors - reds and purples and brilliant greens instead of one solid bit of green slime, with a ball of brilliant crimson trapped inside.

"Red are the radials," she whispered. With the goggles showing the images from the sensors and unable to see anything else, her fingers reached out and blindly searched for the scalpel. "Purples are dense, orange are vascular bundles. Touch only the green. Only the spongy ectophyll. Just like a game of Operation. You can do this. You can do this. You used to always win Operation." Metal met her fingers and she picked up the scalpel.

The purple ran through the green like lace, with bright orange pin-lines racing through the purple. It almost looked like muscle and fat, arteries and nerves. She picked and plucked, slowly separating the green from the glowing crimson center. She didn't dare move faster, knowing she was one wrong move away from a puddle of fluid, but she was also aware of the clock ticking in her ear.

An alarm chimed. Maddie froze and carefully removed her tools, waiting. Without Danny's instinctive stabilizing energy, the specimen wouldn't be able to recover. Her experiment was over.

But the alarm stopped. The specimen stabilized.

She breathed out between her teeth and rubbed at her nose with the back of her glove. She didn't have time to think through why it had come back. The data was being recorded. She would study it later.

"Almost." She had the core nearly separated. A few more minutes. A few more cuts.

Leaning forwards, she teased away the last of the green, leaving only small tendrils of the denser purple and the five main radials.

"I need the storage container," she said aloud, peeling off her goggles and blinking into the normal lights of the room. Without the computer-generated overlay, the ghost was nothing but a smear of green. She turned from it, reaching for where she'd left the container they'd specifically set up for the core. A special version of the Fenton Thermos that would - theoretically anyways - hold a core stable, separate from the ghost.

It wasn't there.

"Where...?" She twisted back around, noticing it right next to her elbow. "Brain's the first thing to go," she murmured, shaking her head and pulling the goggles back over her eyes, picking up a pair of specially designed tweezers and her scalpel.

She would have - at most - twenty seconds between cutting the first radial and the core disintegrating beyond use. At least five of those seconds would be needed to transfer the core from the table to the container and get it sealed. Several seconds to grasp the core properly with the tweezers before starting to cut. If she was lucky, she would have ten seconds to cut all five radials as close to the core as possible. She would probably have less.

If only the ghost had stuck around. With his energy output hovering around, she would have twice the time.

A few swear words slipped from her lips as she maneuvered the tweezers into place, hovering just over the ghost. The timer would start when she grabbed it. One try.

She licked her lips, tasting the tang of a stray splatter of ectoplasm on her face. "You can do this," she breathed.

The tweezers closed, and Maddie started counting.

One, two, three - tweezers slipped, and Maddie had to readjust.

Four - she brought the scalpel into play, slicing through the first radial.

Five, six, seven - the second radial slipped at her fingers trembled, making her have to do the cut twice.

Eight, nine - the third radial went perfect.

Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen - the fourth cut too far away from the core, and she had to go back and cut it again. The extra bit of non-core would ruin her results.

Fourteen, fifteen - the last radial fell away and Maddie pulled upwards with the tweezers. The core stuck, too much of the denser ectophyll under the core was still holding it in place. "No," she whispered.

Sixten, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen - she sliced madly at the purple tendrils, finally loosening the core. Her time was up. She'd taken too long.

Twenty - her fingers trembled as she set down the scalpel and blindly reached for the container. She was about to watch the core was going to disintegrate in her grasp, but she wasn't giving up. It hadn't vanished yet.

Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three - she moved the core and container together, giddy in her brain that she'd apparently miscalculated how long the ghost would last. Perhaps she could make it.

Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six - the cap screwed onto the container by feel, and she heard the container trill as its internal systems took over the containment. On the table in front of her, the remains of the specimen dissolved into liquid.

"You did it."

Maddie jumped nearly out of her skin, wrenching her goggles off and twisting around to see her son standing there, watching. "Danny!" There was a curiously blank look on his face.

He grinned sheepishly. "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you."

Her heart was still beating loudly in her ears. Between the adrenaline of her experiment, and the angry ghost not five minutes ago, and now this scare, Maddie felt on edge. "I did it. I got the core." She turned her attention down to the green-smeared container and the cheerfully blinking lights that showed a healthy, working core trapped inside. "I got it."

"Good for you," Danny said.

Maddie glanced up at his bland tone. "This will set us up for generations, Sweetie."

Danny nodded, a small smile on his face that didn't quite meet his eyes. "I'm glad you got it," he said.

"Yeah," Maddie whispered, holding the container close to her chest. She didn't mind the ectoplasm smearing onto her shirt, or the stuff dripping off the table, or the chirping alarms of the computers that had been meant to monitor the now-gone specimen. "This… this is going to change the world."

Uploaded March 19, 2019
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