Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Get back here and get in the thermos, you ridiculous ham!”

“How dare you! I, TECHNUS, the master of silicon and code, am not a ham!”

“Ah yes, how could I forget – you can cure a ham!”

Danny smirked at the bellow of rage he received in reply and dodged the retaliatory traffic light sent at him. He was sure he’d stolen that line from somewhere, but Technus was being especially annoying this time. He didn’t deserve original material.

Technus’ overall goal was world domination for the sake of his ego, Danny knew, and with his control over technology, he had any number of avenues available to him to attempt it. Some he really hoped and prayed the tech ghost would never cotton on to – some problems he couldn’t simply punch or blast into submission. Technus tended to gravitate to the newest of the new in terms of tech, but it would only take a little prompting to shunt him towards, say, inhabiting the internet and ruling it like a god.

So why the self-proclaimed Master of Technology had decided that attacking the launch of a new robot toy at the toy store and screaming how they would be his ‘tiny minions of global conquest’ would be a good idea, Danny would never understand, but he was certainly not complaining. And now there they were, another chase underway above the city of Amity Park as Technus fled from the ashes of his latest and frankly weakest attempt at world domination, with a swirling shield of randomly snatched up bits of technology between the megalomaniac ghost and the city hero.

“Gotta say, mullet man,” Danny taunted, weaving through the air to avoid the various technological bric-a-brac that came at him from below. “I’d keep this one out of the scrapbook. The day the mighty Technus forgot that ‘toy’ does not equal ‘military grade’.”

“Shut up! It was a highly effective commercial!”

“I don’t think they even needed me for this one! I saw Sam’s grandmother smashing apart your glorious army with her mobility scooter! They really don’t build them like they used to.”

“When I rule the world, they shall build them like they used to! The Technus Empire will have a thriving market in solidly constructed toys! And furthermore- “

Danny suddenly reached out a hand, acid green engulfing it as he spotted a hole in Technus’ wall of junk that gave him a clear shot. The ectoblast burned through the night sky, striking Technus in his face as he turned to argue with his pursuer some more, sending him tumbling from the sky to the ground below, his summoned objects falling with him as his concentration broke.

Technus crashed hard onto his front, complaining about his ectopancreas as he wriggled weakly on the pavement. Danny landed next to him, his legs bent as he slammed into the ground and pulled the thermos from his belt. “No, seriously,” he asked. “What were you thinking? ‘Cause I know you’re a laser focused obsessive maniac- “

“Genius…” Came the mumbled reply as Technus flopped onto his back and propped himself up slightly.

“Obsessive maniac, but even I don’t think you’re stupid enough to mistake a toy for an opportunity to conquer the world.”

“Because there’s nothing left here!” Technus shrieked in frustration, glaring at Danny from behind his… were those glasses or where those his actual eyes? It suddenly occurred to Danny that he didn’t know. “There’s nothing for me to use in my plans for glorious conquest! No experiments, no prototypes, nothing new! All of the glorious potential of technology has fled this miserable backwards Luddite town! What else am I to use to enact my magnificent Empire, with its robust and futuristic public transport systems and absolute subservience to I, TECHNUS?! Tawdry, childish gadgets are all I’m left with!”

“And who do you think is responsible for tech companies with dangerous projects deciding to leave Amity, ‘genius’?”

“Obviously, you!”

Danny rolled his eyes, and pointed the thermos, pushing the button and sucking Technus up in a burst of blue-white light. He slapped the cap on the end and breathed a sigh of relief. All clear. An easy night, for once. He hoped, anyway. Danny had three essays and a project due within the week, he could do with the extra time.

After shooting a brief text to his friends, still tied up at the mall where Technus had… less attacked and more bothered, to tell them all was well, he took off for home, the cool night air enwrapping him as he made for home.

The sight that greeted Danny as he invisibly phased through the roof of the Fenton household did not bode especially well for a quiet study environment. He was used to more unusual activity at home, but this was odd even by their standards. Given that he was a half ghost and wasn’t the strangest member of the family, the standards were high and yet-

“Pile up more in front!” Jack Fenton roared, as he emptied the contents of a cabinet onto the slowly growing barricade of household goods in front of the locked and barred entrance to the laboratory, before the large man hurled the cabinet itself atop the heap.

“Mom! Dad!” Jazz shrieked, running down the stairs as fast as she could manage. “What are you doing?!”

“We’ve got to block off the lab, sweetie!” Replied Maddie, dragging one of the couches from the living room behind her. “There’s a huge, unprecedented electrical storm about to pass through the area of the Ghost Zone our portal is located in! Our projections show it’s going to cause widespread ectoplasmic disruption at unheard-of frequencies!”

“What does that even mean?!”

“It’s going to do spooky nonsense to the portal!” Jack elaborated, stomping off to find more.

“That doesn’t sound bad enough for you to destroy the house!”

“I’m not letting our dimension be sucked into that hellish green wasteland!” Jack declared, chucking plates like frisbee’s to add to the ever-growing blockade.

Danny rolled his eyes at his parents’ antics as they kept arguing with his sister, dropping through the floor, and landing in the lab. After all his experiences in the Ghost Zone, most of which contradicted their theories, and dealing with their, at times, dangerously malfunctioning inventions and weird notions of what ghosts were and how they operated, he wasn’t really willing to take their warnings seriously. Especially when they were so focused on their bad ideas, they never noticed their kid was half dead.

He sighed. That was maybe a little unfair. In broad strokes they did tend to be right about a lot of things, it was just significant details eluded them. Like, say, that ghosts weren’t universally evil monsters hellbent on destroying the living. If they could just wrap their heads around that one, he’d probably start working on telling them about his powers like Jazz kept nagging him to do. Still, he doubted the storm would do anything too bad on this side of the portal, anyway.

They clearly believed otherwise, though, it must be said. The portal doors were shut solid, the faint sounds of whirling ectoplasm just audible over the crashing and arguing going on above. Everything loose in the lab had been nailed down, equipment properly stowed for the first time in Danny didn’t know how long. No, wait, there was one thing they’d missed – there was tray with several sets of chunky metallic bracers on them.

Oh, yeah, they’d mentioned these – liquid metal armour, they’d called it. Meant for emergencies or surprise attacks. You clang them together and they coat whatever you’re wearing with a thin layer of metal for some enhanced protection against ghost attacks. There were six sets, though. Why would they-

Ah. The other two were for Sam and Tucker. Like he’d asked for.

His guilt over dismissing his parents increased exponentially. They did care, it was just… filtered through their way of looking at the world. How did Jazz put it? The situation wasn’t their fault any more than it was Danny’s, no matter how tempting it was to blame someone – they built the portal, true, but Danny knew better than to wander into the thing. Much as Danny could, and indeed did, retaliate with their frequent threats to dissect him, Jazz did have a point. And maybe that ambition would get dropped if they knew who he was?

Danny let his mind wander for a moment. What would it be like if his parents knew about his ghost half? Would he be able to sleep throughout a night for once, because they’d be able to take on some of the load? Would they be able to help him train, back him up in a fight? Or would they be every embodiment of his worst fears, pulling him apart while mourning the son they were killing? He wished he could know.

Gah. The whole thing was a mess. So, he did what he always did when his living (heh) situation reared its head and he had nothing new to stew over – make it a problem for future Danny.

He pocketed the two sets of bracers intended for his friends and locked the rest in a nearby cupboard (No need to let dad get in trouble, because there’s no way it wasn’t him that left them out) and turned to the closed portal.

He hesitated, looking down at the thermos containing Technus. These things never had a particularly lengthy battery life no matter how often his parents iterated on them. So he couldn’t just leave it for when the storm was over, that’d just let Technus loose again. Equally though, as much of a jerk as Technus was, he didn’t want to just dump him in the middle of freak… ‘weather’, he supposed. Knowing the Ghost Zone, storms would be a little worse than just getting soaked.

Danny put the thermos on a nearby table and palmed the activation console for the portal doors. Take a quick peek, see how things are, then figure out what to do. Seemed sensible, right?

As the doors opened, the familiar swirling green revealed itself, humming as the green substance made lazy spirals. Unusually for the gateway to the realm of the dead (note to self, stop listening to Sam’s descriptions of things), though, he could kind of see through it. Maybe? It looked different at least, but… flat. Like a projection of the other side. It looked like a lightning storm was going on, alright, all roiling clouds and bursts of light with no sound. Strangely beautiful, in a way.

As Danny watched, a streak of green electricity arced out from one of the clouds and struck the centre of the aperture. He had a split second to notice that the portal was no longer its usual green, morphing and swirling in the opposite direction, becoming a bright, almost shining blue before he heard a resounding crack and a thunderous rushing of air as he felt himself yanked from his feet violently by some unknown force, dragging him towards the hole in reality.

The portal roared like a hungry animal as Danny hurtled. He transformed mid-flight in a panic, planting his white-clad hands and feet on the edges of the portal, straining to keep himself out of whatever this was now. The brief glimpses he got as he tried to push himself out of the invisible grasp of the portal looked… were those buildings? Oh, whatever! Just don’t get sucked in!

Just as he appeared to be winning the fight against the portal, he felt something collide with the back of his head. It wasn’t a hard hit, but it was enough to break his concentration. With a yelp of surprise, his arm slipped and that was all the portal needed. In the blink of an eye, Danny was sucked into the swirling blue, tumbling, and falling as he was dragged at speed through an eye-achingly bright corridor of blue ectoplasm, screaming all the while.

A series of sounds like explosions heralded Danny’s exit from the monochrome tunnel and he slammed into… concrete? Probably concrete. Brick or earth didn’t feel like this when his face got personally acquainted with it. And how depressing was it that, at only recently fifteen, he could discern exactly what each felt like when he hit it.

Danny raised his head blearily, noticing as he did both that he was still in Phantom mode and that he was somehow at the bottom of a large crater. Oh, great, that was just what he needed, more bad publicity. ‘Phantom tears up public area in reckless attack!’ Because he was also well versed enough in ‘surfaces he gets smacked into a lot’ to recognize that he’d landed on asphalt concrete somewhere. Probably a road.

Well at least this was still the human world. That was a relief. The Ghost Zone, besides the obvious differences you could see, felt different, saturated in ectoplasm as it was. Hopefully, he wasn’t too far from home. It was getting close to curfew time as it was anyway, and he had homework to… why was the sun out?

Fear bubbled to the surface above lethargy. If that malfunctioning portal had dumped in another time zone, he was in way bigger trouble than he thought!

Danny got to his feet and shook himself off, whatever weariness from his unique method of travel falling from him as adrenaline flooded his system. He levitated up out of the crater, and what he saw past the edge was not encouraging.

He didn’t recognise any landmarks whatsoever. Heck, he couldn’t even say he recognised the architecture. Something about these buildings was weird, they looked advanced but… old. Like how people of the nineteen twenties might have thought the future looked like. Danny was on some kind of main street, and everything there looked like high tech art deco, shops, ads, cars, even the fashion.

Fashion. People! He was surrounded by people! People staring at him in… fear. Wonderful.

“Um. Hi?” Danny said, waving at the crowd.

For a moment there was nothing but silence.

Then the crowd of retro-futuristically dressed citizens shrieked in unison and scattered, fleeing from the ghost boy in random directions like disorganised ants.

“No, please, wait! I just wanna know… and they’re gone,” Danny deadpanned, before sighing and landing just on the outside of the crater.

He wasn’t all that surprised – a glowing, flying kid drops out of a portal and puts a sizable hole in the road, he’d run too if he didn’t have a hero complex. And that’s if they didn’t recognise him. There was still skepticism about ghosts the further out of Amity you got despite constant reports, but if they did know him, he could add ‘ghost’ to that list of reasons to run.

Still, though, they’d screamed in English, with American accents, so he at least wasn’t that far out from Amity. Although why they were shouting ‘XJ-9’ he had no idea. Whatever.

Whilst Danny’s mind was racing, wrestling to keep his own bubbling worry from spiralling out of control, wondering where he could find a map, and trying to come up with decent excuses for why he would be out all night, because bare minimum that’s how long it was going to take, he barely noticed the ambient noise around him. A few distant screams as people ran, a gentle breeze melting past his ears, the increasing whine of a jet engine…

Wait. What?

“Hey! Creep!”

Before Danny could register the vaguely electronic tint to that voice, the back of his head exploded in pain, and he was hurled forward. He bounced off the concrete with unceasing momentum before slamming to a stop in the wall of a diner and collapsing to the ground.

“Who let Pariah out…” He mumbled weakly as he propped himself up his elbows. Not even the fruitloop hit that hard! Danny growled, his worry over his displacement boiling over and turning swiftly to anger. Why couldn’t he go anywhere without some serious attempt to beat him up or kill him?! Well, whoever this is, they’re about to get a face full of misplaced aggression!

The anger persisted until he looked up at the sound of a heavy landing, where his jaw dropped open, and any rage was replaced by shock.

The first thing he noticed, and it really shouldn’t have been the first thing, was the pigtails. Blue, in the midst of swivelling around on rivets to point upwards, cute and perky despite jet engines retracting into them. Wide, electronic eyes glaring at him and lips that seemingly were not attached to a mouth, set in a face of solid white metal topped with blue plating that resembled hair. A pair of incongruous pieces of blue armour that resembled a tank top and a mini-skirt, on a heavy metal body that Danny was only just now realising was both at minimum six and a half feet tall and shaped like a teenage girl.

“Hi!” The oddly human looking robot chirped, its (her?) lips curling upwards into a dangerous smile as her (its?) right arm flexed and separated, parts moving around rapidly until it formed what Danny could only call a cannon pointed directly at him. “I’m Jenny! And if you want to wreck Tremorton, you’ve got to go through me!”

… Where the heck am I?!

Chapter Text

“Hold still!” Jenny shouted, trying to take aim at her white-haired target as they sped above the city.

“No! You’ll shoot me!”

“Because you blew a hole in Main Street and ran!”

“Because you were going to shoot me!”

Jenny groaned in impatience as she chased the latest headache in her bad day parade through the skies.

Not a single thing about today had gone right. First mom had “surprised” her by setting off the meteor alarm at five in the morning to test her readiness, then when Jenny hit the snooze button and went back to sleep, she got lectured about her duty until it was time to go to school. Maybe don’t set the test for class-C asteroids if you want me to take it seriously, mom! Then, school was just the worst – Brad was away for a few days on some family reunion. And given she found another letter from a “Secret Admirer” in her locker that was totally not in Sheldon’s handwriting, she couldn’t hang out with him without giving him the very wrong idea that this latest attempt to date her was working. So she had been alone all day.

Which made her easy prey for Brit and Tiff’s most recent plan to humiliate the robot girl – by whatever metric the Crust Cousins used to judge what was fashionable (and Jenny had devoted hours of processor time trying to figure that one out), medieval was back in style, which meant so was tarring and feathering. Add on to that detention for getting feathers and goop everywhere along with her homework getting ruined, no matter how she much protested it wasn’t her fault, and by the time she heard the explosions and found the weird… she was going to go with alien, sat next to a huge crater in the road, she was more than ready for the chance to cut loose and vent some frustration.

Just her luck to get the one bad guy somehow immune to everything she can do! She’d tear her hair out if she wouldn’t fly worse without it.

“This is all just some big misunderstanding…” The boy in the black and white jumpsuit began before weaving around Jenny’s cannon blasts. The last one, the one she was sure he couldn’t dodge, just passed through him as he turned translucent. “I don’t even know where I am!”

“Oh, well, let me help you – you’re in a world of trouble!”

Did he think she was stupid or something? Craters don’t make themselves in Tremorton (and Jenny decided to ignore the fact they were her doing half the time), and explosions don’t come from nowhere. And considering-

“Look, I’m still kind of freaking out over here, would you back off?!”

Jenny rolled in the air to avoid the acid green beam of energy that shot up at her, the attack zooming past her into the sky. She narrowed her eyes at the figure below her, her right arm coming up again to fire a series of shots in retaliation that the glowing boy dodged around.

… And considering that, the ability to fire what her sensors were telling her were very destructive lasers from his palms, she had a good idea how he did it, too!

Jenny put on an extra burst of speed from her boot rockets, the cannon retracting into her arm, to be replaced with an enormous, spiked ball that emerged and grew. Her arm lashed out, sending the morning star shooting out on its chain directly at the white-haired alien. She heard a cry of surprise before the ball went straight through her target and retracted, returning to Jenny’s arm with a clang. The glowing boy solidified, stopped in mid-air, and glared at her.

“Alright, that does it!” He growled, his hands glowing an acid green. “I get dragged from my home, dumped in the middle of a place I’ve never heard of and now I’m gonna get blamed for something I didn’t do by a crazy robot girl with weapons instead of ears?! Fine! If you wanna play…”

With a shimmering sound, the boy vanished from sight. Jenny started, looking around for him. Who was this? She didn’t know any alien who could everything this guy could. Flight, sure, energy blasts weren’t out of the ordinary either. Intangibility, invisibility? All individually, but never all in one. Misty was the closest she’d ever encountered to him.

Jenny whirled on the spot, trying to catch any sign of her missing assailant.

“… than let’s play!”

The glowing boy winked into existence in front of her, his fist swinging around in an arc to crash into her face, a ringing sound echoing through the sky.

Jenny stared blankly at the boy as his look of fury slowly gave way to pain. “… Is your hand OK?”

“Fine, thanks,” he replied with a tight voice. “In my defence, that usually works.”

“I’m sure,” she deadpanned, before grabbing his wrist and lashing out with her leg, the blue metal colliding hard with his ribs and sending him hurtling through the sky towards the ground. He stuttered to a halt and fired back with both palms, the green beams snaking out and catching Jenny in the chest.

She hunched over and hissed at the impact even as she was flung through the air. That stung. Nothing major damaged, at least according to her diagnostics, but that was a major jolt to her system in a way almost nothing else had ever been. OK, then – no more Ms. Nice Bot!

Ow, ow, ow, why did I punch the robot girl?!

OK, yeah, he was frustrated, angry and more than a little scared, but he liked to think he was smarter than that. Not exactly the first time he’s immediately regretted a decision, though. He shook his wrist as he darted between some buildings. He needed a plan.

If nothing else, he needed a plan to take his mind off the fact there was a robot chasing him that was so advanced he was giving her personal pronouns instinctively, and that he really ought to have heard about her if he were anywhere near where he was supposed to, and he might be further than-

No. Stop. Brain, enough of that. Time to fight.

Alright, so, close combat is out, whatever she’s made of is way stronger than I am, and she hits as hard as the Ghost King. I like my teeth where they are. Maybe-

Danny yelped and dodged to the left as a claw crackling with electricity whipped past him, embedding itself in the wall of a nearby skyscraper. He turned and faced the robot girl (Jenny, she said?) as she yanked the weapon that was, somehow, larger than herself out of the wall, a look of incredulity on his face.

“OK, no, seriously, where are you storing all these?!”

“It’s not polite to ask a lady where she keeps her weapons!” Jenny retorted, the claw seeming to collapse in on itself before retracting into her hand as her other formed a… Was that a diamond?

“And I don’t know about you, but I’m just getting warmed up!” She shouted as the diamond glowed a dull blue, before a rushing gout of flame erupted from it, a cone of fire streaking towards the ghost boy. He held his hands up and focused on reflex, a green shield flaring into existence around him. The fire licked around the exterior of the barrier, lapping up and down as Jenny altered her aim minutely. Danny grit his teeth as he felt the interior of the bubble shield heat up rapidly.

Before too long, thankfully, the robot girl ended the torrent of fire and Danny dropped the shield instantly, his hands glowing blue.

“I think you need to cool off!” He roared, thrusting out both palms at Jenny, cold blue beams impacting hard on the robot girls arms and legs. Ice crawled around her, encasing her limbs in unnaturally glittering chunks. She slowly began to sink to the ground as the added weight dragged, struggling as she did. Danny tried not to enjoy the look of surprise on her face and good grief, she was exceptionally expressive. He knew some humans who didn’t convey their emotions that well.

“Well, it’s been nice chilling with you, but I think we’re gonna have to put this on ice for now! Stay frosty!” Danny grinned, throwing Jenny a mocking salute before taking off in the other direction.

“Hey! Oh, no you don’t!” He heard her cry out futilely.

Crack.

… Or what he really hoped was futilely.

He glanced backwards to see her body flexing and shifting again, steam rising from the ice wrapped around her, a spiderweb of cracks appearing in the ghostly blue.

Oh, brilliant.

Jenny slammed herself into the nearest tall building as she chased her target, the final chunk of ice on her arm shattering and dropping into fragments as she did. She shook it, double checking that venting heat to melt the ice didn’t cause any rust, before narrowing her eyes at the retreating form of the glowing boy. Her hair rearranged itself to produce thrusters, and she took off after him, pouring on speed. The more she chased him the more she was sure she couldn’t just let him run around town.

Despite that, her irritation at the absolute mess of her day was beginning to fade into the background, replaced by curiosity. Because whoever this was and whatever his plans for Tremorton, he was, so far as she could tell, impossible. She wasn’t much of a scientist, much to her mom’s disappointment, but you couldn’t live with Nora Wakeman and not pick up a weird miscellany of science knowledge. And doing everything this guy could do wasn’t feasible. Maybe there’d be some vaguely plausible explanation or maybe some of it was microcircuitry built into that jumpsuit but Jenny… doubted it, somehow.

There was this weird itch in the back of her processors. Mom had described it as a ‘gut feeling’, a sensation that you already knew the answer but couldn’t properly express it. And Jenny knew there was something else going on with this boy.

The white-haired kid took a sharp turn down and to the side, another acid green beam zipping past her as he did before he turned invisible again, trying to lose her. Pft, like that was gonna work. Jenny cycled through vision modes until she came across infrared, looking for a teen shaped thermal mass to follow. In a way she did, and it just added to the impossibility of this… being. Because what she found was a near freezing patch moving through buildings. With everything he’s doing, he should be radiating enough heat to spontaneously set the buildings he was passing through on fire, and yet here he was, trackable by being much, much colder than everything around him.

This was so weird. Maybe she should let mom have a look at him before she kicked him back to space or wherever he comes from. She was always complaining about never getting to deal with extreme scientific curiosities anymore.

And… maybe it might be worth talking to him once she’d stopped him? He wasn’t acting like most of the bad guys that made their way to Tremorton. Maybe stun him with something first in case she was wrong.

Aha! There we go, he’s stopped, in the middle of a… is that the mall? Middle of the complex, right below the…

Ah. Ah ha! Let’s see how good your reflexes are when I surprise you, glowy boy!

Danny skidded to a halt in the middle of whatever structure he was in at the moment. A mall or something? Everything around him was all seating, plants, and broad pillars, holding the skylight covered ceiling up. He breathed heavily, forcing himself to stay still and just listen for a moment.

All he could hear was people chattering away, moving around the shops and chains (none of which he recognised, but let’s shunt that off to the side). No jet engines or energy weapons. He relaxed, slightly, allowing himself to return to visibility, propping himself up against a thick column and not caring about the stares and whispers he got from the multitude of people around. Either for suddenly appearing, or his outfit.

Right. So. Plan. Plan to deal with the ridiculously powerful girl who shrugged off more or less everything he threw at her.

Punching was out, she didn’t even feel that. Ectobeams seemed to hurt, and at the very least she reacted to them in a way she hadn’t otherwise, but they didn’t seem to cause much damage. Over time that might work, sure, if he could outlast a robot, but given he was still failing gym class he doubted it. Ice would work if he could get it cold enough, fast enough – metal snaps when brittle after all. How would he get that chance around Jenny’s seemingly bottomless bag of tricks, though?

He counted himself lucky that she couldn’t really harm him any more than he could her – intangibility was an absolute blessing, especially when your opponent didn’t have any specifically anti-ghost weapons. If she had any of Val’s guns, he would be utterly doomed.

Wait. Intangibility. Overshadowing!

Worth a shot before resorting to the Ghostly Wail. He didn’t know if he could even work a body like Jenny’s, but he could-

Glass above him shattered and he snapped his head up, a skylight broken to pieces as something streaked through it at speed.

“Found you!”

Jenny slammed into the ground in front of Danny, cracking the floor as she brought her arm up, the metal shifting once again. A blue ball of energy coalesced and shimmered swiftly into existence between two spikes, humming and pulsating as it grew before it was released. In a panic, Danny phased, his body turning translucent as the ball streaked through him and struck the pillar, detonating with a dull boom. Anyone who’d been curious about the glowing jumpsuited boy leapt back at this point – but some back corner of Danny’s mind noted they didn’t seem surprised by Jenny diving through the ceiling to shoot at people.

“Oh, come on!” Danny yelled in frustration, keeping himself intangible as the robot girl scowled at him. “Can’t you just leave me alone?! I didn’t do anything!”

“Then explain the giant hole and the screaming!” Jenny shot back.

Danny threw up his arms and restrained himself from shrieking in frustration. “I literally fell out of the sky! I didn’t even know I’d crashed anywhere until I woke up with a face full of concrete!”

She scoffed, but she did put away the big intimidating claw gun, which Danny took as a plus. “Right. You’re, like, the fourth person this week to try coming here and wreck my town for kicks, and it’s only Tuesday! Why should I believe you?”

It’s Thursday, Danny’s brain immediately supplied, adding it to the pile of things he wasn’t thinking about right now. Try to talk down the heavily armed girl you probably maybe can’t beat, now you’ve got the chance. Then overshadow if it goes badly.

“Because- “

Crack.

Danny and Jenny both froze, before turning around to face the pillar that had taken the plasma ball instead of Danny.

The load bearing pillar, they both suddenly recalled.

“Oh crikey,” he heard Jenny murmur in shock as the column slowly, inevitably tilted, twisted, and began to fall downwards.

Right on top of a group of shoppers.

Instinct compelled Danny forward, solidifying as he raced to the falling column, halting his flight directly under it as it collapsed. He reached up and braced himself as the concrete fell onto his hands, the weight forcing the air from his lungs as he propped it up with some difficulty.

“Get to safety, move!” He shouted behind him at the people in the path of the falling masonry. The shoppers, paralysed briefly by fear, jerked to life at the urging of the ghost boy, scurrying out of the way. Danny barely had time to set the pillar down before plaster started dropping from above, a web of cracks appearing as that section of the roof began to cave in, screams mounting as the public noticed the danger.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! Danny berated himself. Always go for the shield in built up areas, don’t go intangible! You never know where everyone is in this kind of fight! Now at least part of the roof is going to come down and he had no idea if he could hold it up or not. But he had to try. People were people no matter where he was.

Before he could even make the attempt, the whine of jets reached his ears. Danny tensed, expecting an attack from behind, before the white and blue form of Jenny streaked past him to the roof. Her arms extended out, quite literally, with a whirr, pressing against the collapsing concrete and holding it in place.

He blinked, the sudden shift in her behaviour mildly jarring. But then he shook himself and focused. She was willing to help stop the roof caving in on everyone here, so don’t look a gift robot in the maintenance hatch

“You sure you’ve got that?!” Danny called up, obliterating a few chunks with his ectobeams as they came down as people directly underneath finally got the message and started running. Not quickly enough, as ever – in Danny’s experience nobody ever realised the danger they were in until it might be too late.

“I’ll be fine!” Came the electronically tinted reply. “I’ve got the strength of, like, a million and seventy men!”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“Less sass, more save!”

“… Right. Right!”

The air around him grew noticeably colder and Danny’s hands glowed a bright blue before he thrust them at the ground. Ice grew up in great chunks, a pair of monoliths growing upwards to meet the ceiling. As the ghost boy continued to pour ice into the structure, the tips of the structures began spreading, a thick sheet of ice covering the ceiling.

“Get clear!” He called to his impromptu ally, who retracted her arms back to their normal length and pushed off the ceiling as the ice crept over the patches Jenny had been holding. She flew down and stood beside him as he made the ice thicker, reinforcing it as best he could. After several seconds, after he was sure it would hold long enough to get something more permanent in place, he dropped onto the floor, panting heavily.

He didn’t even react when he felt a warm but still nevertheless metal hand drop onto his shoulder. Yeah, he could fight still, but screw it. If the guess about where was that he could no longer ignore was true, winning wouldn’t matter anyway. He glanced up at the robot girl.

“You’re, um,” Jenny started, looking sheepish. “You’re not a bad guy, are you?”

“… No,” Danny sighed, climbing to his feet. “I’m really not.”

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry! I just… you know, screaming and damage and person with powers, I just thought… I should have- “

“It’s… it’s fine,” Danny interrupted. “I’d probably have done something similar back…”

Home.

He took a deep breath, trying to steady his nerves. “Let’s start over. Hi. I’m Danny and I think,” he started, hating how his voice was beginning to crack. “I think I might be a lot further from home than I thought.”

Jenny looked at him with deep sympathy, before she held out her hand to him.

“Come on,” she said kindly, smiling at him. “I think my mom’ll be able to help.”

After a brief moment of hesitation, he tentatively reached out and took her hand.

Chapter Text

The next hour or so passed in a blur for Danny, almost shell-shocked as he tried to process his new circumstances. Jenny led him to her home, a frankly huge house with a giant telescope sticking out of the top of it, apologising profusely for the misunderstanding/attempted beating. The part of him that wasn’t on autopilot got it, mostly – he would have reacted similarly to a strange robot girl gouging a hole in downtown Amity and professing innocence in the face of screaming people. He’d have just figured either Technus or Vlad had gotten it into their heads to try more indirect ways of killing him.

In all honesty, now he had time to register her as something other than a threat, he was struck by how weirdly cute she was. A hair shy of a foot taller than him and solid metal, but she seemed in a lot of respects like a lot of the nicer girls around his own age, very friendly and social. He found his mind occasionally sliding off the fact that she was a robot, forgetting it until she did something like turn her pigtail into a phone and reality hit him again. Jenny had called ahead to her mom with the bare bones of the situation, and even in his haze Danny was curious – who designs a robot this human-like?

Then she’d lead him into a vast laboratory, and he’d gotten to find out.

He’d had a brief moment to form an impression of Jenny’s mom – short, ridiculously spiky hair, glasses so thick he could probably start a fire with them. That was all he’d been able to get, because the instant he’d set foot in the lab, the diminutive scientist hadn’t let up. Dr. Nora Wakeman, as he managed to pick up in the barrage of scientific jargon and muttered observations, flitted from device to device, poking and prodding him, taking readings, scratching her head before crying eureka (literally. Even his parents didn’t do that!) and moving on to the next thing. He glanced at Jenny with a raised eyebrow. She smiled back, sheepishly, and mouthed ‘sorry’ to him.

Danny was grateful for it, in a way. For the moment, Dr. Wakeman was set on taking readings and more general questions that he could answer automatically. He was sure later he’d wince at how rude he was seeming, especially giving rote answers to the more sympathetic questions he was being asked, but for now, it let him collect his thoughts and try to figure things out.

He was in another dimension. He was in another dimension.

This shouldn’t be that weird, or frightening. He technically dived into an alternate dimension filled with monsters on the regular, sometimes just to go skiing with yetis.

But he had a way home there, didn’t he?

“How is it you can do what you can do, young man?”

Danny snapped from his reverie at the question, blinking a few times at the coke bottle glasses of Jenny’s mom as they stared up at him expectantly.

“Oh. Um, well… It’s probably kind of unbelievable...”

“I have seen several invasions by aliens, robots, and alien robots just in recent months,” she replied patiently. “To say nothing of everything in between. I’m sure I can handle it, and it may be vital to understanding how you came to be here.”

“OK. I’m a, uh, I’m a ghost.”

For the first time since he’d gotten there, Dr. Wakeman actually stopped dead (heh) and stared at him incredulously.

“… I take it back. That is unbelievable.”

“True, though,” Danny shrugged.

“Young man, ghosts don’t exist!” Dr. Wakeman insisted. “Do you mean to say that your abilities mimic that of a traditional ghost?”

“No, I mean to say my powers are that of traditional ghosts because I am a ghost,” Danny deadpanned, before his gaze flicked up in thought. “Although I don’t think I’d call myself traditional. I’m way more open to new ideas.”

“If you don’t have a clear idea where they came from- “ She began.

“Um, mom?” Jenny interrupted, tentatively. “I think he might be telling the truth. See the thermals? He’s freezing, even when he’s using his powers. Wouldn’t that break one of the, whatchamacallums…”

“Laws of thermodynamics?” Danny chimed in, to Jenny’s nod.

“Yeah, them!”

“Everything I do runs off ectoplasm, and it’s… uh, how did mom put it…” Danny replied, scratching his head. “Physics defying in its efficiency? I think it’s something like nearly 100% energy transfer from it to whatever it’s powering without losing anything of itself. So, I guess I wouldn’t give out heat? I never thought about that.”

“Cool!” Jenny enthused.

“Impossible!” Sputtered Dr. Wakeman.

“Do I have to start floating around and going boo? Because I’m not sure how many ways I’ve got to say, ‘I am a ghost, I defy conventional science’.”

“Then do explain these vital readings I have!” Dr. Wakeman shot back, waving one of the myriad devices in the air. “Do ghosts generally have heartbeats where you’re from?”

Danny paled; his full attention now focused on the short woman. This was straying dangerously close to territory he really didn’t want it to. “Um.”

“’Um’, indeed!” Nora retorted triumphantly. “I hardly think a spirit of the dead would have need of functioning organs!”

“How… How necessary is this to know?”

“Incredibly!” She shouted. “There’s a theoretically infinite number of parallel dimensions, and if I’m to find a way to send you to yours specifically, every detail is going to matter! I can’t just rip open a dimensional portal and hope for the best. I’ve been expressly forbidden from doing that after last time, in fact.”

“When’s that ever stopped you,” Jenny muttered under her… breath, for want of a better word.

Danny hesitated, two separate anxieties clashing in his head. In the blue corner, new and fresh, was the sheer absolute terror he was valiantly supressing about being stuck in an alternate dimension, as far removed from home, family and friends as he could get, and with no way home except the scientist in front of him, maybe. And in the red corner, seasoned and powerful, was his unending, gut-wrenching fear of being strapped to a table and dissected, turned into a science project all because of one accident a year ago, a fear stoked in no small part by his own parents. And even if he escaped that, there was the other side of it, of having people look at him like a freak, a monster, no matter what he did to prove otherwise.

The fight lasted an eternity in his own head and four seconds in reality, but in the end, there really was only going to be one winner. Deep and entrenched as it was, there was no way the reigning champion could stand up to the one-two punches of “you don’t know any way of getting home by yourself” and “you have no other options for help”, mixed in liberally with jabs of “AAAAAAAA”. A quieter, more rational part of Danny’s mind, the referee to this boxing match of fear, also added in occasional commentary like “they seem nice” and also “really you only keep your identity secret to avoid confronting mom and dad with it and avoid the GIW, you don’t need it here,” but like most referees, it was shunted to the side.

Danny sighed. “Alright. But bear in mind…”

A ring of white light appeared around his midsection.

“This actually makes it less believable.”

Jenny stared blank faced at the now black-haired Danny as he finished telling his story seated on the edge of a desk, an expression of bafflement mirrored on her mom’s face.

“… how can you be half dead?” The robot girl eventually managed, the largest question coming out of her mouth first. Danny just huffed a breath and shrugged his shoulders.

“Heck if I know. There’s only two others like me, and none of us were created quite the same way. The only one who might know how all this works is a creepy fruitloop I am not on speaking terms with, and I don’t know where I’d start to find out any of this myself. Our best guess is ectoplasm bonded to me on a molecular level when I turned the portal on, but it is just a guess. Mostly I just try to protect my town from all the ghosts coming through for world domination or vengeance.” He paused, eyes going skyward. “Or to skin me.”

“To what?!”

“Long story,” Danny deadpanned, before his eyes flicked to the ceiling again. “Actually, no, short story – he’s a hunter and I’m rare.”

“Ewwww, that’s disgusting!” Jenny exclaimed, her retching subroutines itching to see some use.

“Is it bad that I’m used to it?”

“Yes!”

“Ahem,” Nora Wakeman interjected, a faint air of almost parental concern on her face as she looked at Danny. “Well, this… does give me an idea of how to get you home, but simultaneously creates new problems.”

Danny tilted his head quizzically as Dr. Wakeman launched into a string of technobabble that Jenny only half paid attention to, mostly to note where she was deliberately avoiding terms like “ghost”, “Ghost Zone” and “ectoplasm”. For an omni disciplinary scientist of… indeterminate age (the de-aging machine in the basement was when Jenny started to question exactly how old her mom was), the good doctor was having quite a bit of trouble wrapping her head around the notion of ghosts existing and having a science attached to them. No, instead Jenny had her attention firmly on Danny. He was… weirdly fascinating.

At a glance, you wouldn’t think he was anything other than an ordinary boy. A little skinny for his age, bright blue eyes, ridiculously shaggy hair, pale skin. Then you started paying more attention and a lot more revealed itself. He wasn’t so much skinny as he was lean. Jenny had seen martial artists built like that. Well, when her and Brad had that kung fu movie night anyway. Those same blue eyes kept looking around, apparently on instinct, on the lookout for danger. His skin was almost too pale, worse than someone who just didn’t get enough sun. He suited it, somehow, but it still wasn’t totally natural.

Although Jenny would have to admit she had a unique advantage in picking Danny out – she could run discrete scans and get some biometric data from him, and indeed was doing just that. His core temperature, although not well below freezing like before, was still much lower than was healthy, as was his heartbeat. Evidence of his ghostly… well, half-ghostly nature.

She watched his expression with some curiosity as he struggled to keep up with her mom’s theory and although she couldn’t quite explain why, she found she liked him, at least what she’d seen so far.

“… and that’s where we hit a snag, I’m afraid,” Dr. Wakeman finished with a sigh.

“OK, so, let me make sure I got this right,” Danny began, holding his hand to tick off his fingers. “You think the easiest way to get me home would be to build your own Ghost Zone portal, because if I got here through there, they’re linked in some way.”

“Broadly, yes, although the technical details-“

“I’m a C student, skip those,” Danny said, waving his hand. “But without a starting point it would take you a long while to build one?”

“Correct,” Nora nodded. “The… beings-“

“My parents call ghosts ‘spectral entities’ in scientific papers, if that’s easier to say,” Danny snarked.

“Yes. Well. Either… spectral entities don’t exist here, or they’re much less common, so I’d have to start from nothing. A sample of ectoplasm would do, even!”

Danny blinked. “And… why don’t I count for that?” he asked slowly, his hand glowing an acid green as he waved it around. “I could give you some right now.”

“Because, young man,” she began, as though explaining to a child. “Despite your protestations, you aren’t a spectral entity. You are, to use C student language, a human with extras. No self-respecting scientist would study you to understand gh- spectral entities. You’re too far removed from them for the data to be in any way generalisable. And for our purposes, there’s extraordinarily little guarantee that an attempt to use mutated or impure ectoplasm won’t just result in failure or worse, sending you to some other dimension.”

Jenny didn’t have a name for the expression Danny’s face contorted into at that. It somehow managed to mix profound relief, hope and fear. Did humans emote the same way between universes?

“… Did you mean that?” He asked, quietly. At the questioning look of Dr. Wakeman, he elaborated. “The part about dissecting me being pointless to a good scientist.”

“… Yes. I did,” she replied, almost certainly noting, along with Jenny, that nobody had mentioned dissection. Oh boy, because what her processors needed were more questions about the boy from a paranormal dimension. “But that’s beside the point. This is going to mean months, perhaps years of research and synthesis attempts before I can even start on a portal to the… parallel dimension in question.”

“Ghost Zone,” Jenny helpfully supplied to her mother’s twitching eye and Jenny’s own snicker.

“That, yes.”

“There’s got to be something,” Danny growled, his hands bunched up at his temples in furious thought. “I can’t have all these powers be useless now I need them most… Gah, why didn’t I pay more attention to my parents when they were… Wait!”

Danny leapt off the desk and began rummaging around in his pockets.

“I know I put them… Aha!” He declared, pulling out… four nice looking chunky bracelets?

“I mean, I like them,” Jenny said hesitantly. “They’ve got a nice ‘space age’ feel. But I don’t see how they help?”

“They help like this!” Danny returned, putting two of them on his wrists and clanging them together.

Immediately, the seemingly solid metal melted and shifted, speeding up Danny’s arm and latching onto his t-shirt, seemingly soaking it through and continuing to the rest of his clothes, circuitry forming, glowing and pulsing with increasing vigour as the network of nanites established itself. Small metal nodules emerged from the liquid on his upper chest, glowing faintly green as the liquid metal flattened out and revealed the power cell concealed beneath the chunky metal. In mere moments, every inch of his clothing was coated, gleaming slightly in the lab light, lines of power glittering.

“Ta-dah!” Danny cried, jazz hands waving to the excitement of the younger, metal Wakeman and the absolute bemusement of the doctor.

“Awesome!” Jenny squealed. “Instant sci-fi fashion! Let me try!”

She snatched the other two Danny had set down on the desk and repeated the same motion. The devices worked slightly slower than they had on Danny, evidently confused by the metallic nature of their current host. However they were programmed apparently decided to just cover everything, as the metal flowed across Jenny’s entire body, shortly covering her in the same shiny metal, glowing green circuitry and nodules.

“How do I look?” She asked, directing a haughty, ‘fashion model’ look at the ghost boy. Danny blinked, before his lips quirked upwards, ever so slightly.

“Kinda suits you, actually,” he admitted. “Although I think the green kinda clashes with the blue.”

“… Darn, you’re right. Does it come in anything other than glowing acid green?”

“No idea. Get me some food colouring, we’ll crack open one of the cells and do science!” Danny grinned wider. Jenny cheered internally – he’d been in a (completely understandable) funk since arriving, so she’d hoped goofing around a little would draw him out of his shell.

“Children,” the elder Wakeman interrupted, stopping the two teenagers mid-flow. “While I admit liquid metal armour is a somewhat impressive science project, I fail to see how it helps our portal issue?”

“Because this was built by my parents as emergency armour to resist ghost attacks. And they power everything,” he explained, flicking the power cell latched onto the top of his t-shirt. “With ectoplasm. You want a sample, doc? You got a bunch right here!”

Nora’s eyes widened and she leapt to the pile of instruments she’d discarded earlier in her attempt to gather as much raw data as possible. She grabbed what Jenny could only describe as a vacuum cleaner with a TV attached and waved it over the green power cells attached to the other two, staring at the screen intently and muttering as readings flitted by too fast for Jenny to discern any meaning. Eventually, the device pinged as Danny smacked his wrists together again, the signal for the emergency armour to reform into the bracelets.

“Scan complete. Results: Unknown substance. Unknown elemental composition. Conclusion: Entirely new to known science. Preliminary data ready for display. Query: Would you like to alert the Nobel Committee?”

“No, no,” she dismissed, removing the prompt with a flick of her fingers before reading the analysis of the ectoplasm at high speed. “Not until we’ve done more study!”

Danny raised an eyebrow at the doctor, who was visibly revving back up to her earlier manic ‘mad science’ energy. “How often do you have to do that that you’ve built it into your machines?”

“Pretty often,” Jenny replied dryly, copying Danny’s motion with her wrists, and setting her pair next to his on the desk. “Mom’s got a closet she dumps them in upstairs.”

“Excellent!” Nora suddenly cried. “What a fascinating substance! I can see how one could construct a portal from this, some very unique properties! And did you say your parents study this? Wonderful! I would love to share results with them! This should cut down research and development time significantly! With luck, we should have you home in three months!”

“… did you say three months?”

“Give or take a disaster or a major breakthrough, yes!”

“Three…”

Jenny felt aghast at the ashen look that crept onto Danny’s face at the time scale. But if that was how long it took, then…

“Uh, mom? Since he’s kinda stuck here until then, I was wondering if we should, you know-“

“Yes, quite right, XJ-9,” her mother cut in absently, waving her hand above her head and already engrossed in calculation. “We can’t have him wandering around homeless. There’s a spare room opposite yours, I believe. Get our guest properly situated. I believe this is a promising avenue of inquiry…”

Jenny turned to face Danny, who was staring into the distance, his expression colourless and horrified. She sighed. So much for bringing him out of his shell, at least right now.

“Come on,” she said quietly, putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing in what she hoped was an encouraging manner. “Let’s get you set up.”

The only sign he noticed was turning and nodding slightly, following the robot girl up and out as Nora bustled around behind them.

Jenny had gotten a lot better about reading people.

In her early days, when she’d first been allowed to interact more with the outside world, humans and their motivations and reactions had confused her. To be honest, they still did a lot of the time, but she’d long ago learned it was better to just roll with it and try to puzzle out the why’s later on.

So, she wasn’t all that surprised when she rolled over in bed and turned on her thermal vision well past midnight to see a teenage boy-shaped freezing cold patch sat on the roof of her house. She’d expected it, even.

Jenny’s processors whirred as she tried to figure out what she should do. Her first instinct was to just barrel up there immediately and try to help however she could. She knew she’d be devastated if she’d ended up stuck away from everyone she knew and loved. Plus she still felt like she had to make up for attacking him on sight, for all he’d said he’d probably have done the same.

But then… she remembered the times something bad happened to Tuck or Brad, and they just wanted to be left alone, and got angry with her trying to cheer them up. She knew the feeling, too. You just wanted to wallow and process whatever had happened, because you didn’t think you could feel anything but bad right then. Maybe it was best to let him work through it himself. And she was never very good at comforting people she knew, never mind relative strangers, though not for lack of trying.

… Oh, who was she kidding, of course she’s going up there. Helping people was what she did, and she wasn’t just saying that because she was literally made to do that. Besides, what he had to be going through was all about feeling alone. Better to show him he wasn’t.

She cracked her window open and peered up. Yeah, there was the weird ethereal glow she now recognised as ghostly up there. There wasn’t strictly supposed to be a way up there, but most architectural barriers vanished when you were a super-powered teen, as both her and likely Danny knew. She reached her arm up, and up, and up, the whirring motors stretching the limb until it reached the edge of the roof and latched on.

She let herself get pulled up by her extended arm and clambered over the top as quietly as she could. Which was honestly not very quietly, she was a six-and-a-half-foot tall robot who weighed a third of a ton, but the effort should be appreciated, darn it.

Sure enough, there was Danny, in ghost mode for whatever reason, sat hugging his knees and looking up at the stars. She could only see one side of his face, but she recognised dried up tear tracks when she saw them.

“Hey,” she said softly, walking up to him slowly. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“… You know you guys even have different stars?” He replied after a pause, his voice distant. “Been trying to pick out recognisable constellations, but I can’t spot anything. From either hemisphere.”

Jenny sat down next to him and turned her gaze skywards as well. She’d never really taken the time to stargaze. Why bother when you’ve been up there, been to other planets?

“You must know your stars pretty well if you can tell we don’t have the same ones.”

Keep things casual, she decided.

Danny shrugged half-heartedly. “Wanted to be an astronaut, so I studied everything about space I could. I don’t think it’s going to pan out, now, but… I’d still like to get up there, somehow.”

“You should,” Jenny responded, keeping her eyes up and her tone light. “If your galaxy’s anything like ours, there’s a lot out there.”

Danny’s gaze broke from the stars to look at her, green eyes a little wider. “You’ve been to space?”

“Mm-hm,” Jenny nodded. “Been to space, got lost in space, helped overthrow an evil robot empress in charge of an evil robot space empire. You know, the usual.”

That got a dry chuckle from the ghost boy. “If that were coming from anyone else, I wouldn’t believe them.”

“Aw, come on, you’ve got to have something similar, big time ghost superhero like you.”

“… So I might have had to punch the king of all ghosts in the face to stop him invading the human world,” he admitted, reluctantly. Jenny elbowed him in the side gently.

“See? Bet we could swap some stories if we wanted to.”

“Mm.”

Silence fell over the two of them again as they kept looking at the sky, the stars shining down on them. Jenny found she regretted not watching the night sky more often, sitting here with a ghost. What even were the constellations, anyway? That little bit of trivia wasn’t in her databanks. Something to fix.

“… No,” Danny eventually whispered, causing Jenny to turn and look at him quizzically. “I can’t sleep. Not right now. Too much bouncing around my head. Mostly guilt.”

“Hey, it’ll be OK,” Jenny replied as she scooched closer, nudging him with her shoulder. She wasn’t sure how comfy he was with hugs, otherwise she’d have hugged him immediately. “I know your friends and family are gonna be worried, but mom’ll get you home. You’ll see!”

To her surprise, Danny shook his head. “That’s not it. I mean, it’s not helping, I can’t even begin to imagine how they’re going to feel. Like, I text my friends that everything’s alright, head home and just vanish. My family, Sam and Tuck… they’re going to be devastated, because of me, because I didn’t listen to my parents when they said the portal was going to do something weird.”

He dropped his gaze to rest his head on his knees, staring at the ground. “But is it bad that that isn’t what I’m thinking about most right now?”

Jenny tilted her head, curious. “Then what is?”

“… it’s that, you’re right, this’ll be horrible for them, but I’ll get home eventually, and we can work through it all when I do.” He heaved a great, ragged sigh. “But I’m not going to be able to get out of it without telling my parents all of… this.”

He gestured to his hair and plucked at his jumpsuit, despondent. It took Jenny a moment to realise what he meant.

“They don’t know you’re a hero?” She asked.

“They don’t know I’m a ghost,” he clarified, morosely.

“… I don’t get it.”

He looked at her weirdly, then realisation dawned in his eyes. “Oh. Right. I’m so used to people just knowing who the Fenton’s are by reputation. I can’t believe I forgot for a second you don’t know my parents are ghost hunters.”

“Ghost hun- Wait, are they the one’s that want to skin you?!”

“No! No, no, that’s Skulker! Hunter ghost, as in big game hunter!” He exclaimed, waving his arms around in what was to Jenny an endearingly dorky way. The brief moment of levity vanished rapidly, though, as his arms dropped to his side. “Although what they want to do isn’t much better.”

She let the quiet linger for a moment as she thinks it through, before she remembers. “Oh.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a reason you went straight to dissection earlier, isn’t there?”

“Ding ding ding, points to the marvellous Jenny, she wins the grand prize,” he drawled sarcastically. “They weren’t around when I walked into the portal and turned the thing on by accident, and at first I hid what I’d become just… because. When in doubt, leave the parents out, that’s basically the motto of most people our age, right?”

With that, Jenny suddenly realised why she liked Danny as much as she did in less than a day – ‘people our age’. The whole time, even when they were fighting, he talked to her, treated her like she was normal. Or least like him, different but still a person. It was like he forgot sometimes what she was, because he was more interested in who she was. Almost nobody did that that quickly.

Focus! She bereted herself. Not the time for, admittedly pleasing, revelations about the boys character.

“It was after I got a handle on some of my powers, and I started fighting the ghosts coming through the portal, that I had an actual reason to not tell them anything.”

He suddenly sat up and puffed his chest out, his arms gesticulating dramatically. “Why that darned ghost boy!” He bellowed in a much deeper voice. “He’s a menace to the town! When I get my hands on him, I’ll rip him apart, MOLECULE BY MOLECULE!”

He dropped the impression and instead adopted a much stiffer posture, and a higher pitched, lecturer voice not unlike her own mom. “Now, dear, you shouldn’t just destroy him like that. Why, how will we dissect him inch by inch to learn everything we can about ghosts?”

Danny slumped over again. “I couldn’t go a week without hearing how much they wanted to tear Danny Phantom apart and learn what makes ghosts tick in the most direct way possible. Except they think they already have that figured out! ‘All ghosts are simple-minded creatures of obsession and evil and don’t count as people.’ It’s all wrong, I know from experience that it’s wrong, but how do I convince a pair of scientists they’re wrong, especially since they might just see it as the ghost that’s replaced their son trying to trick them?”

“… They might not. Parents can surprise you by understanding sometimes,” Jenny offered uncertainly, and watched as he shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head side to side.

“Might, might not. I didn’t want to roll the dice on telling them until something changed, you know? But now? Even assuming my friends or my sister don’t just tell them I’m half ghost while I’m missing because it might help with the search, I’ve still got no explanation for how I got past several locked doors and a pile of heavy junk and opened the portal, and that’s assuming they even believe the bit about parallel dimensions.”

His eyes shimmered in the starlight, and Jenny tactfully ignored them. “So I guess I’m just… afraid of what’s going to happen when I get home, and guilty that that’s what I keep coming back to, instead of how this is going to affect everyone else.”

Jenny was quiet for a few moments, as Danny raised his hands to his eyes and wiped, returning his gaze to the stars afterwards. She cycled through any number of options her conversation subroutines threw up in response to that, but discarded them all when she realised that she had been right the first time, when she’d decided to come up to try to help in the first place.

Let him know he isn’t alone.

“It’s not wrong to be afraid, you know,” she started, slowly. “Not with all that going on. Though… I don’t know your family like you do. Do your folks love you?”

Danny starts, his head whipping around to meet Jenny’s sympathy before nodding. “Yeah. It’s… It’s weird and it comes through in strange ways, but they do.”

“And you said your sister knows already? She’s fine with it?” At Danny’s nod, Jenny smiled gently. “Then I think you’ll be alright. I used to worry my mom only bothered with me because I was her most successful try at building something to protect the world. Then I watched her tackle an enemy because she was trying to abduct me. I think… I think being a parent overrides a lot.”

Danny eyes went a little wider as he considered her words, some of the despair draining from his face. Jenny was elated – it worked! She managed to make him feel better! This almost never worked for her! Keep going, keep going!

“Besides, look at it this way,” she continued. “You’ve got three months to figure out how to tell them, the way you want to. And tell you what – I’ll come with you when you do!”

“You… You will?” Danny asked, hope naked in his tone. Jenny nodded enthusiastically.

“Of course! Gotta make up for kicking you in the head somehow!”

“Yeah, actually, I think I’ll still have the lump by the time your mom’s done with the portal,” he joked weakly, rubbing the back of his head. “… Thanks, Jenny. Glad to know I’ll have someone there if the worst comes to the worst.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied, satisfied. She hadn’t gotten rid of his worries and fear, nothing short of being able to confront them would do that. She was pretty sure, anyway. That’s how it seemed to work for Brad, Sheldon and all the others, most of the time? Well, OK, and her too. But she’d at least broken the loop he was in. She’d helped. Her circuits always hummed pleasingly when she managed that.

“I kind of envy you, you know,” Danny said suddenly, jarring her from her admittedly self-indulgent reflections.

“You’ve already got everything out in the open,” he explained in response to her questioning look. “Your mom backs you up with being a hero, you’ve got friends, you don’t have to hide or be afraid… I wish I could have that.”

“You kidding me?” Jenny retorted. “I wish I could hide! Everyone here bounces between just barely tolerating me and wanting to take my head off. I never know what I’m going to do that’s going to make them turn on me next! Yeah, sometimes it’s my own fault, but others? I could litter by accident, and Tremorton’d get me exiled to space! I can’t have a single normal teenage experience no matter how hard I try, because everyone knows who I am, what I am. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without getting reminded I don’t fit in. If anything, I envy you! I’d give a lot to be able to just be normal now and then.”

“You really don’t want this, trust me,” Danny shot back. “My grades have tanked, I’m lying to nearly everyone who cares about me, I’ve got a reputation as a weirdo and a social pariah, and power malfunctions and disappearing to fight ghosts don’t help that… keeping everything a secret isn’t much of a picnic.”

“… Heh,” Jenny chuckled after a little pause. “I guess the grass is always greener, huh?”

“Guess so,” Danny mused, smiling faintly.

They both sat in silence again, more able to appreciate the sights the sky had to offer now the worst had passed. Light reflected off her eyes as the moon dragged itself through the sky, full and bright. Stars surrounded it like fireflies flitting around a streetlight, and the dim glow from Tremorton itself created a golden halo around the city. It really was beautiful tonight. She’d have to do this more often.

“Hey, do you have one bad guy that’s, like, the big one?” Jenny asked conversationally, changing topics to lighten the atmosphere. At Danny’s nod, she continued. “Me too. I’m curious, do they spend, like, half the time trying to convince you to join them in the stupidest way too?”

Danny’s face lit up. “Wh… Yeah! He's always like ‘Ah, Daniel, let me murder your oafish father and marry your mother, I won't be an abusive controlling jerk, I promise!’ And then he’s shocked, shocked, when I tell him to buzz off!”

“Oh my gosh, right?! What part of ‘hero’ didn’t you get? ‘Ah, yesssss, Jennifer, soon you shall be a slave to the Cluster!’ Yeah, sell me on it more, why don’t you!”

“Haha! Alright, alright, my turn!” Danny replied, his smile much wider now at the impromptu game. “Elitist jerks at school?”

“Got tarred and feathered by them today! You?”

“I get locker’d daily by my alter ego’s biggest fan!”

“Oh, that’s classic! Ever get mind controlled?”

“Ugh, don’t remind me. Creepy ring master with a ghost controlling staff made me steal things. Wrecked my reputation for months.”

“Ouch. Still better than mine, though – got reprogrammed to destroy all holidays, everyone hated me for that one.”

“Oh, that sucks. On that subject, though, Christmas shenanigans?”

“Took over from robot Santa one year!”

“Nice! Got trapped in a Christmas poem until I confounded the writer with an orange!”

“Pfft, ha! OK, OK, annoying pest bad guy?”

“My personal punching bag, the Box Ghost!”

“Oooooh, you get to fight yours? Lucky! Kilgore’s too cute for me to get away with hurting him.”

“Weird cousin?”

“Plant person made by my aunt! You?”

“Opposite sex clone of me!”

They both stopped abruptly and stared at each other.

“… seriously?!” They chorused, before the pair dissolved into laughter, peals of mirth echoing out across the night and bouncing from nearby buildings. Danny ended up flinging an arm around Jenny to hold himself up as the sheer ridiculousness of their shared experiences finally burst the dam of his anxiety and he laughed uproariously, tension draining from him.

“You… pfftt, ha… you think anyone else has this kind of nonsense happen to them?” Jenny giggled, holding her sides as the burst of merriment faded, and looking down at her still chuckling companion.

“Heck no,” Danny replied in between spurts of snickering. “I don’t believe it’s happened to me as often as it has. Pretty sure there’s only one of us per dimension. I’m not sure the multiverse could take more.”

He suddenly fell backwards, his arms behind his head, looking up at the stars, before turning to grin widely at Jenny.

“So I’m stuck far from home and I’m probably going to have to come clean to my parents when I get back,” he explained. “That sucks. But right now? I’m not feeling all that sleepy, and I’ve got a whole sky full of stars I’ve never seen before. I’m gonna make my own constellations! Wanna join me?”

By way of an answer, Jenny beamed at the ghost boy, her literal thousand watt smile the only preceding warning of her also dropping onto her back. Danny bounced lightly as six hundred pounds of metal girl collapsed onto the rooftop, before raising her arm and pointing at a cluster of stars to get them started.

So absorbed did they become in creating a new map and meaning of the stars, they managed to miss the white-blue glow that briefly illuminated the Tremorton junkyard.

The town had become quite good at cleaning up after major incidents and battles. Very unwillingly good at it, but good nonetheless. Before the day was out, the crater created by the arrival of Danny Phantom had been filled, debris swept away, and anything miscellaneous just got shipped to the scrapheaps. It was at this point standard procedure.

There hadn’t been anything high tech about this one, though, so where this weird looking tube thing they found at the bottom of the hole in the road came from, nobody had any real idea. But Dr. Wakeman didn’t put in a call for any missing technology, and whoever it was XJ-9 had fought hadn’t used anything like this according to eyewitness accounts. So the city workers who attended the scene just shrugged and threw the overly complicated thermos atop a pile of old Cluster drones in the dump and carried on their merry way.

And for hours that was all well and good.

But now, in the darkness of the junkyard, a red light flashed from the thermos, and a robotic voice warned of a low battery, until shortly after even that died. The instant it did so, the top blew off the thing in a burst of bright, searing light as the entity trapped within surged free, floating high and proud over the pile of abused drones.

“AHA! FOOLISH GHOST CHILD! YOUR INFERIOR TECHNOLOGY CANNOT CONTAIN I, TECHNUS! NOW I SHALL… shall… where the heck am I?”

Chapter Text

Danny was so bored.

That shouldn’t be something you say two days into an enforced stay in an alternate dimension filled with advanced technology and aliens, and yet here he was.

After he’d woken up late yesterday, late enough that Jenny had already shot off to school, he’d been pretty eager to get out and about. Sure, he still felt kinda sucky about the situation, but venting to Jenny about it had helped a lot in dealing with it. She was a good listener, gave him some pretty solid encouragement about the whole thing. Didn’t hurt at all that she was fun, too - making up constellations with her had them both laughing.

With that and a more optimistic look at the situation inspired by her, that morning he’d stopped down in the lab to let Dr. Wakeman know he’d be going off exploring.

To be told he absolutely could not in no uncertain terms.

The more rational side of his brain did get it. It was bad enough bringing diseases from one side of the world to the other, never mind a different world entirely. So, a short quarantine was maybe in order whilst Jenny’s mom went over all the various samples and reading’s she’d gotten when he’d first arrived to be sure he hadn’t brought something ridiculously deadly through with him. Or used her automated process for that while she worked on studying the ectoplasm she had, whichever. It made sense.

Unfortunately, rational brain was having to contend with bored teenage brain right now.

He’d been so bored he actually did his homework. His school bag had survived the trip with him, and he’d figured he may as well do his assignments as long as he was stuck here. Assuming he can go back to school without issue when he returned, Lancer would be pleased. That had, mercifully, taken up the time until Jenny came back from school, and they’d settled in for a movie marathon with a mountain of snacks and oil until it was time for sleep. Thank Clockwork cheesy horror movies existed here too.

Today though? Homework was done, the only books in the house were super technical science stuff, the non-super science computer had a password he’d forgotten to ask Jenny for, and the only TV he was aware of was in her room. He wasn’t clear on the etiquette of this world just yet but barging into someone’s room and stealing their TV was probably out. There were board games, but he’d need at least one other person for that.

He let out a groan. One more day, maybe more, that’s it. Then he can start exploring the town a little more.

Danny hauled himself up from the sofa he had been listlessly lazing on. Fine, then, go for a wander in the house. It’s the house of a mad scientist, after all, there’s got to be something interesting around here somewhere.

How was there nothing interesting anywhere.

Danny had vaguely assumed that all mad scientists were the same as his parents – that is to say, deeply uncaring about the safe storage of their dangerous creations. Granted, they had the excuse of most of their stuff being supposedly harmless to humans but leaving lasers powered by ghost juice just laying around was probably still bad.

But Dr. Wakeman? In the three or so labs he’d found that she wasn’t currently using (good grief, who needed this much laboratory space), there was nothing out of place. No weird looking project he could examine or learn from or mess with for his own amusement. Really advanced looking equipment, sure, she couldn’t have built the most human-like robot he’d ever seen otherwise, but none of it looked especially fantastical. Not that he had the faintest idea what some of this was.

Oh well, at least he’d killed an hour or so. Yeesh, this house was big, every time he thought he’d gotten it figured out there was some new set of rooms he’d somehow missed the first time out.

… Like these stairs to a basement, for instance. How had he missed this?

Eh, maybe they kept pinball machines down here or something. At this point he’d settle for any kind of entertainment.

A sense of foreboding crept up Danny’s spine as he wandered down. Something about this place felt forbidden, like he wasn’t supposed to be down here. Nobody had said anything to him about it, but still. Vibes. You get a feel for them being occasionally dead.

He wasn’t really sure why, though – disappointingly, this was just another lab. Well, maybe workshop would be more appropriate. There was a really big glass jar… thing. It looked big enough to cram a few people into, which. Um. Leaving that one well alone. He recognised a few bits and pieces of the other equipment down here; they were all to do with machining metal or building circuits. Wait, was this where Jenny was made? Or born, maybe? Whichever.

Cool idea, but without knowing for sure this wasn’t much more interesting than… what’s wrong with that wall.

Danny blinked a few times as his investigative instincts, honed by a year of dealing with Vlad and his paranoid architectural habits, immediately homed in on a back wall that looked just ever so slightly off. Secret door?

He walked up to it and shoved, and hinges creaked as the panel hidden in the wall swung open.

Secret door! Now this was much more mad science!

As were the contents, as Danny made his way through, his hand ignited with ectoplasm as a torch. All darkness and cobwebs and bundles covered against prying eyes. He pulled a dust sheet from the largest object sitting in the room. His eyes widened as he drank in the sight before him.

The dust sheet had concealed… This looked disturbingly like a larger version of Jenny. The metallic tube top and mini-skirt were recognisably similar to hers, if much bigger and a dark blue on this robot, and the head was much less human-like than Jenny’s. The fists resembled a gorilla’s, and he was suddenly glad that this robot wasn’t his welcoming committee to Tremorton.

And there were at least seven other, similarly dust sheeted and of varying sizes, which Danny also removed. Every single other robot, because that’s what they all were, resembled his robot roommate in some regard, be it colour scheme, pigtails, or some obvious technological relation. One of them didn’t even seem like they had any means of movement, except… Jenny can fire rockets from her pigtails, so maybe this one that looked like a radio with a face could do that to get around? … Were these prototypes? Wow!

He crept around and examined the others. He peered at one that almost looked like a snoozing metallic baby, swaddled in circuitry. Another appeared to be a cross between a vacuum cleaner and an octopus, another a very depressed looking metal dog. A pistol with legs, for… some reason. An absolutely adorable tiny robot with claws that Danny was absolutely taking home with him if he could manage it, and a three-legged, one-armed bot with a TV head.

Danny stepped back to survey the deactivated group in wonder. There were eight other robots down here! That was so cool!

The smile he wore at his discovery slid from his face slowly but surely, however, as he thought more about this. Jenny, so far as he could tell, was entirely self-aware – a true AI with her own personality. He hadn’t had any real problems accepting that, a fact which he attributed to both consuming a significant amount of science fiction, and learning the hard way that ghosts were people even if they weren’t human, which didn’t stop some of them being jerks. Unfortunately, that facet of his character was now drawing some worrying conclusions about the robots in front of him.

They didn’t seem to be as advanced as Jenny in some regards, but were they intelligent as well? People as much as her and him? If so, why were they locked away down here? They didn’t look… Well, OK, the big one looked very dangerous but come on, the baby? The small pincer robot? Why would you leave them down here? Or why not warn him off coming down if they were dangerous? It didn’t seem right just leaving them down here to gather dust.

He reached out and brushed his thumb against the screen of the three legged one as he pondered. It would probably be better to ask Jenny about this when she got back. He’d ask Dr. Wakeman but interrupting her in the lab when she was frenzied about something was the one warning he did get, so perhaps not.

As his thumb moved across the screen, however, the inky blackness lightened and flickered, and the faint whine of electricity built up slowly but steadily.

Jenny hummed to herself as she turned the corner onto her street on her way home from school.

This hadn’t been a bad day! Brit and Tiff had left her alone most of the day, too preoccupied with some infighting with the popular kids to bother the robot girl, her classes went pretty well, and Sheldon was being less obsessive than usual, so she had some company! And now she could head home, finish up her homework quickly, and hopefully talk Danny into something fun again. It’d only been a day, but she was really enjoying having someone her age in the house. He was funny, friendly, and perhaps most importantly, he got it.

A couple of times in the movie marathon she’d make some sarcastic remark about the heroes in the deliciously terrible horror movies they were watching, comparing it to her own experience having to fight something similar. He’d just talk back with some similar event from his own set of bad guys, with the tone of someone who knew what she felt from experience. Another teen hero with a complicated life - she didn’t have anyone here she could have that kind of connection with, although Brad came close.

Oh, when he and Tuck got back, she was so going to have to introduce them to Danny!

She was wondering how best to do that – probably just something simple, like hanging out at the mall or the park. They were both talkative dorks, so they’d probably hit it off in those circumstances – when her hand wrapped around the doorknob of her front door and flung it open.

To be immediately knocked backwards by a wall of sonic force accompanied with a deep bass rumble.

She leapt to her feet immediately, flinging her schoolbag to the side to protect it from any further damage. Her arms shifted and split apart, her still intact hands grabbing onto the pistol grips of the large guns that emerged from her elbow joints. In an instant she had them pointed through the open door, ready for anything.

“… What?!”

Well, anything except all her sisters arrayed in the hallway playing musical instruments.

XJ-8 held a tuba, playing it with enough force that it had been what knocked Jenny down when she’d opened the door, XJ-1 giggling as she bounced within the mouth of the tuba, acting as the mute. Standing on her shoulder was XJ-3, a triangle gripped in her pincers she was hammering hard in time to the music. XJ-4 had her hands around both a bass and a violin, drawing her bows against two sets of strings. XJ-2 was repeatedly hiccupping at a bass drum, the blasts she fired producing booming beats, as XJ-7 beat out a rhythm on the others of the set.

And standing at the front, reading from the screen of XJ-5 whilst the floating radio played a trumpet, stood Danny and XJ-6, arms around each other and singing, backed by the rest of her sisters.

“What’s the life of man any more than a leaf?

Life has its season, so why should there be grief?

Oh in this wide world, we appear fine and gay!

Like a leaf we shall whither, and soon fade away!”

Jenny stared in blank confusion as the music died down enough for Danny dash forward and grab her shoulders.

“Jenny!” He shouted enthusiastically as the eight-robot-and-one-half-ghost orchestra paused their rendition at the entry of the robot girl. “Why didn’t you tell me you had sisters?”

“It… didn’t come up, I guess?” She replied, sheepishly. “When did you-“

“XJ-9!” XJ-6 interrupted, her one arm wrapping around the ghost boy, her screen displaying a huge smile. “Please tell me we’re keeping him! He actually listens to me!”

“I mean, he’s staying with us for about three months and… no wait, mom only activates you guys in an emergency! Did something happen while I was gone, XJ-6?”

“Hexy!”

“… what?”

“I wanna be called Hexy now!” XJ-6… or Hexy, Jenny supposed, shouted gleefully. “Danny gave me the name!”

“Hey, I just asked if any of you would like one,” Danny shrugged modestly. “Kinda surprised only two of you took me up on it.”

“Hexy – a reference to her unit number, the hexadecimal numeral system, the heat exchanger device and the character from the early 3D television show ReBoot,” XJ-5 chimed in from behind them cheerily.

“… I intended two of those at most, but sure,” Danny shrugged.

“Who was the other?” Jenny asked.

The ground shook as XJ-8 lumbered forward, tuba still held at the ready. Her servo’s had a deep bass whine as she bent over to look at her younger sister.

“This unit is now designated ‘Jane’”, the gorilla like robot rumbled in a monotone.

“… That’s great! Both of you!” Jenny responded, a smile creeping up on her face, before she turned back to Danny. “How’d this happen?”

“Well, OK, it started like this…”

“… and you’re seriously only activated whenever there’s an emergency?” Danny asked, incredulous. “That sucks! You guys have just as much right to exist in the world as Jenny!”

“It is what it is,” XJ-5 waved off his concern. “At least things are always interesting when we wake up! So, what’s going on now? Who are you? What are you? Some weeeeeeird readings coming from you! I’m pretty sure you should be dead! Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, and why can’t the oh-so-brilliant Jenny handle it,” XJ-6 grumbled.

“Oh, there… kind of isn’t anything?” Danny replied, sheepishly rubbing the back of his head. “I, uh, I’m staying at the house for a few months, and I got bored. There’s nothing to do here and I can’t go out, so I wandered round, found you guys…”

He made an expansive gesture, a clear ‘you can figure out the rest’ in his arms.

“You snooped around a laboratory and activated robots you didn’t recognise because you didn’t have anything to do?” The mechanical octopus that was XJ-4 piped up. “Oh my. If there isn’t anything wrong now, there certainly will be soon with that attitude.”

“Hey!” Danny protested. It sounded feeble even to his ears. “… OK, yeah, fine, it was dumb. But hey, it’s not like I actually planned to do that, and it worked out! The world isn’t ending or anything so, you know. Better than most times you mess around in mad science, in my experience.”

“Great. That’s all I’m good for, being activated accidentally by curious houseguests,” XJ-7 moaned morosely. “Why do I even bother…”

“Is… she alright?” Danny asked, concerned.

“She’s fine, she’s always like this,” XJ-4 dismissed.

“That actually makes it worse, you do realise that, right?”

“Query,” the huge one Danny knew to be XJ-8 interrupted. “If there is no emergency, what is our function at this time?”

Danny paused for a moment, and then shrugged.

“Wanna play some board games?”

“Why would you invade us?!” XJ-4 shrieked as Danny and XJ-6 flipped over their orders for the turn. “You said we’d invade England together!”

“Did we?” Danny replied innocently. “I’m pretty sure I remember my advisor over here only telling you you’d get what we promised.”

“And we promised to WIN!” Shouted XJ-6 gleefully.

“Guess this is what happens when you don’t listen to your sister,” Danny grinned, turning and holding up a hand to his partner, who happily slapped her one hand onto his. A quick glance at the board by the dismayed robot sisters (seriously, Danny would have to ask how Dr. Wakeman managed to make all of these robots so expressive, it was incredible) confirmed what Danny and XJ-6 had predicted – with their surprise betrayal, the other 3 teams were pretty much doomed.

Diplomacy wasn’t a game Danny got to play all that often – never had the time, or the right amount of people to make it work properly. And even when he did, he could count the times he’d won on a single finger. Sometimes he hated living with geniuses.

So to have beaten a group of advanced, albeit seemingly human level, robots at the game, with the sister who claimed to be his fellow ignored sibling? Oh yeah. This was a good feeling.

“Data indicates only one likely outcome,” XJ-8 declared, pointing with her free hand as her other held XJ-1. The baby-like robot (another thing to ask Dr. Wakeman about, but in this case the questions would probably be confined to ‘Why?’) concurred with her game partner, gurgling in a dejected manner.

“Of course we lost, we had me on our team,” XJ-7 sighed, her vaguely canine head hitting the table.

“No, no,” XJ-4 dismissed, patting her sister on the head condescendingly. “We lost because Team Tiny over there put troops on our border.”

XJ-2 and 3 both tittered to themselves and Danny grinned. Neither he nor XJ-6 had planned on making an alliance with anyone, both deciding they’d try to win entirely by themselves even if that wasn’t strictly how the game worked. But darn it, XJ-3 was too cute for Danny not to listen to when she offered to turn their already losing position into a kingmaker scenario for the team of bitter sister and half ghost.

“Is that a unanimous decision by our teams?” XJ-5 queried, acting as the judge to make up for the odd numbers involved. Strictly speaking they needed 7 players for a full game, but they’d decided teams were more fun, especially since only Danny was familiar with the rules.

The other three teams all signalled their assent, XJ-4 flinging the games paperwork to the table in a huff as she did so.

“Alright!” Danny cheered as XJ-6 pumped the air. “Good game, guys!”

“You would say that,” huffed XJ-4.

“No, I mean it!” He insisted, grinning a little at the sore loser bot. “I don’t have enough time or people to play this one normally, so thanks everyone!”

“Absolutely dandy, bucko!” XJ-5 chimed in cheerily. “At least losing’s a different experience than what usually happens when we wake up!”

“Yeah, usually we either have to fight something, or something blows up,” XJ-6 added. “This was more fun.”

“That still bothers me,” Danny frowned. “Seriously! You’re all people!”

“… no we’re not?” XJ-4 said hesitantly.

“You know what I mean! It’s not right you’re just kept down in the basement! Why do you get less of a life than Jenny?”

“Yeah!” XJ-6 piped up. “See, he gets it!”

“Like, do you guys even have names?”

“This unit is designated XJ-8.”

“I mean… yeah,” Danny conceded. “But I mean, do you have personal names? My name isn’t homo sapiens ectoplasmus 2, for instance.”

“Jenny named herself,” XJ-7 raised her head to interject. “Mother just calls her XJ-9 like the rest of us.”

“Well, do any of you WANT a name?”

The robots around the table suddenly stilled, and Danny could hear the processors whirring as the eight prototypes contemplated that question.

“… can we?” XJ-4 asked, looking from sister to sister nervously.

“Why not?” XJ-6 questioned. “If Jenny can, why can’t we? I want one!”

“I’m happy enough with XJ-5, honestly.”

The majority of the sisters nodded their agreement with that sentiment, although some Danny could see were reluctant about it. A shame, really, but hey, you can’t enforce a sense of individuality if people are content with their lot. A lesson Sam had yet to learn. Danny chuckled to himself at the thought.

Then the floor shook, as XJ-8 stood and approached the halfa.

“This unit requests a redesignation,” the giant bot rumbled.

“Yeah, help me out too, Danny!” XJ-6 insisted.

“You… You really want my help picking a name?” When the two bots nodded, Danny beamed at them. “Cool! I won’t let you down! Alright, lemmie think…”

He tapped his chin as he pondered. “OK, so, Jenny is kind of based on J9, so let’s start there. X-J8, J8, Jate… Jane? How does Jane sound to you?”

Clicks and whirring emanated from the hulking sister of his roommate, her eyes flashing and flaring as she thought through the suggestion.

“Redesignation accepted,” was the eventual reply. “This unit will now respond only to Jane.”

“Me now, me now!” XJ-6 yammered excitedly, her one arm flailing a little. “And no J names! Gimmie something that’ll stand out!”

Danny grinned at the enthusiastic TV bot. In a lot of ways, he related to XJ-6 – they both felt neglected and ignored by family, although he’d admit the robot girl had WAY more of a chip on her shoulder about it. No matter what, he was making sure at least she stayed active as long as he was here.

“Hm. OK, no J names… So maybe something based on 6…” Danny tapped his chin in thought. “6, 6… Oh, I got it! Tucker and me watched an old TV show a few months back with a character called Hexadecimal. How’s that sound?”

“Eh, too long. People won’t remember it, and they gotta!”

“Remind me to never introduce you to a different girl with blue hair back home,” Danny deadpanned. “Alright then, let’s shorten it to Hexy.”

“Hexy… I like it!” The robot girl declared, her screen flickering for a moment before displaying a wide smile. “Alright, everyone has to call me Hexy now!”

“Great! Everyone else, you sure you don’t want a name?”

Danny caught XJ-4’s tentacle briefly twitch, as though she wanted to raise her hand to him, but she eventually shook her head with the rest of her mechanical family. He shrugged, but made a mental note to ask her alone at some point. Maybe she just didn’t want to admit it in front of the rest of her sisters. Danny knew that kind of familial crisis all too well.

“Well, I guess that’s that then. What should we do now? My quarantines still on, so we have to stay in the house.”

“Alert,” XJ-8… No, Danny shook his head, not anymore. Jane interrupted. “Unit designated ‘Jenny’ will be returning to domicile in one standard hour.”

“Really?” Danny started, before glancing at the clock. “Huh. Time does fly when you’re having fun, I guess... Oh hey, I've got an idea! We should surprise her! Any of you guys know how to play an instrument?"

"No, but give us five minutes and a decent download connection and we could!" XJ-5 chattered.

"Great! So here's what we're going to do..."

"... And then we searched for 'deeply ironic songs for robots to sing', came up with that one about people inevitably dying, which was also ironic for me, your sisters found all these instruments from… somewhere, and we waited to catch you by surprise!”

“Wait, now that you bring it up,” Jenny questioned, pointing a finger at her siblings. “How did you play some of those? We don’t have lungs!”

XJ-5 and Jane glanced down at their wind instruments briefly, before meeting each other’s eyes and turning back to Jenny.

“Yeah, you got me, sis,” XJ-5 replied.

“No data available,” Jane rumbled.

“… I’m choosing to put that down to interdimensional weirdness,” Danny supplied.

“Oh sure, you can, I have to live here with this mystery now!” Jenny laughed. “Oooh, I never get to spend time with you guys! What did you have planned after this?”

Danny scratched the back of his head. “… I’ll be honest, this is as far forward as I thought through. Any ideas, girls? I still can’t leave the house, but anything you all wanna do together?”

“I demand board game vengeance!” XJ-4 shouted.

“Nah, nah, Danny says he’s got a hard drive full of video games from his world!” Hexy enthused. “I wanna try some and see if I can do this thing called ‘streaming’ with ‘em!”

“Spaaaaaa day!” XJ-5 sang. “My joints are killing me!”

“You don’t have joints!”

“Explain my pigtails, then, vacuum for brains!”

“It’s always like this…” Bemoaned XJ-7.

Jenny watched her sisters devolve into bickering, before turning to Danny. He shrugged.

“All of the above?” He suggested, and briefly flinched at the cheering that ensued from the robotic sisters. The brood of robots all shuffled into the living room, XJ-4 swiping at various board games as they passed, Hexy talking loudly about her plans for her streaming channel.

“Was that weirdly in sync to you too, or is that normal?” Danny queried.

“No, it’s, uhhhh… We’re all kind of networked?” Jenny replied. “Not, like, hivemind, but something to ‘facilitate coordination’, mom put it.”

“Ooooh, so kinda like a sibling bond thing? Like me and my sister can’t hide anything from each other.”

“Huh. I never thought about it like that…” Jenny muttered, a smile growing on her face. “Yeah. Sibling bond! I like that! … Um, Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for… treating my sisters like this,” Jenny said shyly. “They don’t get a lot of respect from anyone. Not even mom. I’m glad you found them.”

Danny scowled slightly. “Like I told them all, they’re people even if they’re not human. I don’t get how anyone can talk to them for more than two minutes and not get that.”

“You’d be surprised,” Jenny said, sadly. “A lot of people think like that about robots. Doesn’t matter how human we act, for some of them it isn’t ever enough.”

Danny put his hand on Jenny’s shoulder, a sympathetic expression on his face. Jenny turned to look at him, her circuits flickering strangely as she did so. They stayed that way for a moment before Jenny shook herself and plastered a big smile on her face.

“Enough of that, come on! I wanna do a spa day with my sisters!”

“Yeah, and Clockwork alone knows what Hexy’s doing with my hard drive,” Danny grinned back. “Let’s go!”

And so it was that, a few hours later, when Dr. Wakeman exited her lab and found the living room a chaotic mess of the all the XJ series, XJ-4 triumphantly laughing over a board game with several other models, XJ-8 having swapped her hands for twin polishers and giving both XJ-5 and XJ-9 a thoroughly enjoyable buffing, and XJ-6 yelling at a TV screen with their houseguest giving her pointers about some game or another involving a large man dressed as a bat, that the good doctor decided Danny could wait a day to know his quarantine was lifted.

“Heehee ha HA HA HA HA HA!”

The cackling resounded over the junkyard, echoing as it collided with piles of scrap.

Technus had never been happier. Of course, he’d only been bamboozled by his new surroundings for a short time! A mere day and a half of careful investigation (with some small measure of being yelled at by the junkyard owner, a complete philistine to the ways of technology), and he had discovered the truth.

A different Earth! A new world to plunder and conquer! And what plunder such a place had! Technology beyond compare! Articulated, fully functional robots of all shapes and sizes! The perfect fodder for reshaping into an invincible army of the mighty Technus!

Oh, but then, but then, he had found the true prize! Thrown out like so much garbage, like the people of this blighted dimension couldn’t see the potential! A pile of robotic drones, far in advance of even this worlds technology! A vast, advanced insectoid army of alien robots! It was all he could do to not frolic through the air with joy!

“NYA HA HA HA! At last, the opportunity I deserve! All the beautiful, sexy technology I could ever dream of! And even more to come from this world! For now I, TECHNUS, the master of all technology extradimensional and extraterrestrial, shall take control of this horde of magnificent robotic insects, and without the Phantom child to get in my way, nothing can stop me! The Technus… Cluster? No, doesn’t fit the insect theme… Hive! Yes! The Technus Hive shall make all of this plane of existence MINE!”

With a final cackle and a mad, enthusiastic smile, Technus dived into the pile of abandoned Cluster drones. The pile glowed ominously and began to shake.

Before Technus abruptly exited, the same crazy grin on his face.

“I, TECHNUS, do not have the faintest idea how these things work!”

OK, yes, perhaps in his zeal to finally enact the Technus Empire on this virgin territory, he forgot that he kinda, sorta, needs to understand how the technology works in order to take full control.

But that was acceptable! To learn about technology was almost as exciting as using it to crush his enemies and conquer nations! He could make a lair here, a throne of junk from which to study these drones… and perhaps improve them! He could think of several improvement that weren’t just Technus branding!

Yes! All he needed was time… and here, with the secrecy afforded an interdimensional traveller, and no Phantom to ruin things for him, time was a resource he had in abundance.

Now where to start…

Chapter Text

“… and then I hurled the ship into the sun!” Jenny exclaimed, setting down one wrench with her left hand and picking up a screwdriver. Her right arm lay partially disassembled in front of her, layers of armour plating piled neatly to the side as she tinkered with the interior components. “And that’s basically how the Cluster stopped being a problem for us. Vexus got deposed, and the last thing she tried was so pathetic I’m not really worried about her anymore.”

“That is so cool!” Danny enthused from the other side of Jenny’s room, the book in his lap ignored for the moment. “Seriously, you inspired a whole empire of alien robots to revolt? They should make a movie about that!”

“It wasn’t that impressive,” Jenny replied, focusing on her detached arm to hide her blush. “Anyway! That’s most of my bad guys. Tell me about some of yours!”

“Alright…” Danny said, his eyes drifting upward. “OK, so I already told you about Vlad – very jealous you were able to put your archenemy out of action, by the way… Uh, Skulker you kinda know?”

“The hunter? The one who wants your skin, that I still can’t believe you’re so casual about?”

“You’d get it if you met him,” Danny assured her. “Sure, he looks like he could do it. He’s all spiky metal and green flame mohawk, and he sounds real intimidating. But he really, really can’t pull it off.”

“How come?”

“He’s a complete idiot about it. He did alright the first time we fought. When he first turned up, I had no idea how any of this worked. Could barely fly, go intangible, couldn’t do the ectoblasts, that kind of thing. That time I won mostly by luck and a gorilla-“

Jenny’s head rotated entirely to face him. “… what?”

“You don’t have gorillas here?” Danny asked with faux innocence, and chuckled at Jenny’s petulant expression. “Nah, school project involving the zoo I had at the same time he turned up. The gorilla really didn’t like him. But anyway, after that he just kinda… Kept doing the same thing, over and over, even when it stopped working. I think he’s just too prideful to adapt. He’s so sure he’s the ‘Ghost Zone’s Greatest Hunter’ that he still thinks he doesn’t need to try. If he wasn’t trying to kill me, I’d be insulted.”

“Oh,” Jenny said. “I guess that makes sense why you’re not all that bothered by it then. Still though. Imagine if he was just a little bit more competent. I like your skin where it is!”

“Weirdly enough, so do I!” Danny grinned at Jenny, who smiled back and turned back to her arm. “But yeah, you’ve got him, Ember, Spectra, Technus, Walker… Pick a name?”

“Sure! But first, what are you – Ow!” Jenny’s face contorted in pain for a moment, and she rubbed her shoulder. “Stupid actuator…”

“Are you OK?” Danny said, getting up and laying the book on the bed – which he still couldn’t entirely believe Jenny needed.

“I’m fine, it’s just this bit of my shoulder, it always manages to catch something,” Jenny grumbled, fiddling with the interior of her shoulder. “And of course, it’s the only sensation of pain I’m allowed to have, so mom can know what’s wrong…”

“Is there… anything I can do?” Danny asked, hesitantly. Life as a Fenton lad may have made him more informed about engineering and internal mechanics than most, but he did not recognise anything inside his new friend’s arm, at all. He was actually a little worried about the glowing bits. “I mean, I’m not great at robotics, but…”

“Probably not,” Jenny sighed. “This is the ‘most efficient’ model mom could come up with. Never mind my comfort…”

Jenny slapped her remaining hand to her face. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry. It’s honestly not even that bad. It’s just… frustrating. It’s a low priority for mom, and things keep coming up that stop her looking at it. Like, it works fine even if it snags, it can wait until the alien invasion is repelled, or the improved irrigation system she’s working on for places with food shortages is done, and on and on. Those are more important, but… little things matter too.”

“I know that feeling,” Danny replied. “Not quite the same, but at least on paper my parents are the best ghost hunters the town has, so they’re getting called out all the time. It puts food on the table, I know, but sometimes I’d like some time with them that isn’t ghost related.”

“Yeah…” Jenny sighed, before she shook herself and picked up the tools again. “Enough of my self-pity circuits acting up. Where were we?”

“You were about to ask me something?” Danny replied, not quite able to shake the impulse to help. What could he do…

“Oh yeah! Why’re you reading my history textbook? I’ve got a big stack of comics that’re way more fun than that.”

“… I mean, I’ll probably take you up on that when I’m done,” Danny mused, reaching back over for the book and flipping it back open. “But, right now I want to see if I can find where our universes diverge. It’s weird, we seem to have pretty much the same history up until the 1920’s, but that’s in spite of a lot of differences. I don’t know what the odds of that are.”

Jenny peered over. “Oh, you guys had the Civil War, as well?”

Danny nodded. “Yeah, we did. It’s even mostly on the same dates, I think? Same years, anyway. But we didn’t fight it with tanks.”

He flipped the book around to show an image, a full colour illustration of what appeared to be Confederate troopers marching alongside a metal monstrosity on treads. It kind of reminded Danny of the tanks of World War 1, but misshapen, in an odd way.

“You didn’t?” Jenny replied, surprised. “That’s so weird.”

“Yeah, and… Well, this definitely didn’t happen.”

He flipped it to the next page, and Jenny raised an eyebrow.

“No Lincoln for your universe?”

“Well, he was the president for us too,” Danny clarified. “But he didn’t personally lead the war effort in a massive tank called John Brown’s Revenge.”

“So where did he lead it from?”

“… The White House?”

“Weird name.”

“And there’s another one…” Danny muttered. “I should be writing these down. But yeah, best I can tell we had extremely similar histories up to a point, but tech was always just… further ahead here? But it didn’t change much in the grand scheme of things? I can’t work this out at all.”

“Hmmm… Maybe ask mom? I’m pretty sure she’s got some degree or another in history. ‘Till then, though, pass me that screwdriver? And tell me about… Let’s go with Ember.”

Danny’s mouth worked almost independently of his brain, telling stories about the fiery rockstar ghost, to Jenny’s interest. His eyes were fixed on the maintenance and Jenny’s twitchy actuator, his brain on the idea that formed from her suggestion.

Yeah, OK. I’ll ask your mom.

“… I’m sorry, young man, you’d like what?” Nora Wakeman blinked at Danny. The ghost boy in question rubbed the back of his head.

“Um, so, Jenny’s been having some trouble doing maintenance, and she mentioned wanting to get a new part for her shoulder, so I’d like to learn how to help her do that. I know she’s really complicated and all, but I just want to do this one thing for her, so it can’t be that hard, right? And in return for teaching me how to do that, I’ve got some experience being a lab assistant? In a ghost hunter’s lab, but, uh. Yeah. And I’m kind of at a loose end here anyway, can’t exactly go to school, and you’ve given me a place to stay, and I’m grateful, and I’d like to pay you back if I can? Please?”

Dr. Wakeman continued to stare at him owlishly as Danny lapsed into silence. This wasn’t exactly going how he thought it would. Danny had kind of imagined walking in here all confident and proving he’d be a great lab assistant to have, but instead here he was, rambling away. If it wasn’t friends or family, he really fell apart. Well, or enemies. Banter was always plentiful there.

Eventually, however, she set down her pencil carefully and turned to Danny properly. “Have you any experience with machinery?”

“Yeah, actually! I mean, not a huge amount, and nothing like… this,” Danny said, gesturing around. “I was telling Jenny, tech here is way more advanced than back home, so I’d probably be lost on a lot of things, but…”

He trailed off again, realising this wasn’t exactly selling him well.

Dr. Wakeman didn’t seem all that put out, however, nodding to herself. “Hm. I think we can work with that. And you say this was prompted by XJ-9?”

Danny realised this probably wasn’t the time to be bringing this up, but the spike of irritation he felt compelled his answer. “Jenny.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Jenny. Her name is Jenny. Why do you keep calling her XJ-9?”

Nora’s eyes narrowed at the slight hostility in Danny’s question. “Because, young man, I’m speaking of her in her capacity as the defensive system for the planet.”

“…OK, so? Her name is still Jenny. What, would you like me to start calling you by your social security number instead of your name?”

Danny cut himself off and screwed his eyes shut, angry at himself. Oh sure, he thought to himself. Now you can find words, when you’re angry for a friend. Well done, you’ve almost certainly screwed this for you and her. Dr. Wakeman was even letting him stay here, free of charge, and here he was mouthing off to her. He was such an idiot.

He just… He knew by now how much not being treated like a person hurt Jenny. What seemed obvious to him, that she was sapient and self-aware and thus deserved all the respect that meant, seemed to be lost on a lot of people who saw metal and assumed she was just a mindless, if sophisticated, automaton. And to hear her mom talking about her like that, well…

That hit much closer to home for Danny than he’d like.

He braced himself for the scolding he knew he, at least on some level, deserved.

But instead of what he expected, Dr. Wakeman instead smiled broadly at him. “Yes, I think that will do. We’ve skipped a few steps, but that’s fine. Come with me.”

“I… What?” Danny asked, flabbergasted, as Dr. Wakeman walked with purpose deeper into what Danny assumed was her main lab. He followed along, surprisingly struggling to keep up with the older woman.

“Daniel, do you have any idea how many people come to me to demand I teach them all I know, to create a Jenny of their own? Especially since I haven’t published much of my work leading up to her.”

Comprehension dawned on Danny’s face. “Oh. That… all the time?”

“It is a constant nuisance,” Dr. Wakeman confirmed, annoyed. “Badgered at conferences, lectures, the grocery store. To say nothing of the ones who just come to the house uninvited! I relented exactly once, and… well, I’ve regretted it ever since. Dr. Locus was not the man I thought he was.”

Danny took a moment to process. OK, yeah, in hindsight, what he was asking for was completely bananas. Even just maintenance information on Jenny, to someone with the right knowledge, would be catastrophic, to say the least. He couldn’t out-fight her in any capacity when he’d first arrived, and even though now he had a reasonably good idea what he could do to win, that didn’t change how formidable she was. Giving out information about her construction was probably not going to happen.

“Oh…” Danny said, sadly. “There’s no way you can let me know how to make anything to do with Jenny, is there? I guess I should’ve thought about that.”

“On the contrary!” Nora Wakeman retorted, stopping in front of a dust sheet. “It’s because you didn’t think it through that I’m going to teach you!”

“I… What? What kind of sense does that make?”

“The best kind! You didn’t come with prepared speeches, or examples of your work, or arguments for ‘spreading the knowledge of extremely powerful robots for the benefit of all mankind’,”, she said, rolling her eyes. “You just wanted to help my daughter by helping me, and you stood up for her. Now that, I can respect.”

“So that was a… test?” Danny asked, confused. “Hold on, but you do call Jenny XJ-9 sometimes.”

The borderline mad enthusiasm on Nora’s face faltered, and she looked pained for a moment. “Yes. A… Habit I’m trying to break. I’d appreciate if you take as my first direction as my lab assistant to remind me when I do that.”

“… Sure,” Danny replied, a little warily. This wasn’t what he expected. Or more accurately what he’d feared. Dr. Wakeman was trying to alter scientific habits of a lifetime, for Jenny? Did… Could his parents…

He shook himself. Not the time. “Guess I’d better get started, then!” He said some forced cheer.

“Indeed,” the diminutive doctor replied briskly. “Now. I regret to say I don’t think I can teach you everything you’d need to know in any reasonable timeframe, especially not to try constructing your own parts.”

Danny deflated. Another thing he should have thought about, really. Jenny is stupid advanced for even THIS world, where, thanks to his skimming of Jenny’s textbook, they had their computer revolution in the 1920’s, decades ahead of his own. Of course he wouldn’t be able to pick it up in time. Especially not with his grades. The one idiot in a family of geniuses.

“So!” Dr. Wakeman continued unabated, seemingly not noticing her guest’s sudden despondency, reaching her hand for dust sheet covering a table. “We shall simply have to take a shortcut!”

She yanked, the dust sheet flowing off in one motion (a trick Danny knew from helping his dad practice was much harder than it looked), revealing…

“An old invention of mine, the-“

“The Cramtastic Mark 5?!” Danny interrupted, incredulous.

“-Cram… Mark 7, actually,” Nora corrected, peering at him quizzically. “You have something like this in your own dimension?”

“Yeah, for a little while,” Danny replied, staring at the Cramtastic. After the shock of seeing something so weirdly familiar wore off, Danny could see there were some significant differences. There were four screens, instead of three. The helmet appeared to be sleeker, as well as bigger, clearly intended to cover the whole head, not just the crown. There were more minor design changes as well, art deco stylings etched into it, but it was recognisably the same type of device.

At Nora’s continued questioning look, he elaborated. “My teacher brought them in before a standardised test, a little less than a year ago. He said it was so we’d do well enough to secure his bonus, but I found out a few weeks after that it was because the ghost attacks at school were making the district nervous about our scores, and sent them out. Mr. Lancer was trying to keep our spirits up by making a joke of it. They’re supposed to… well, what it says, cram knowledge into your head. Worked, too, at least on my friend Tucker. But you’ve got them, too? How?”

“Hm. Well, that was what it was made for, certainly, albeit on a grander scale than to prepare for a standardised test. I could never entirely work out the bugs in it, though,” Nora mused. “Fascinating. Is this parallel evolution in action, or are our dimensions more connected than at first it appears? If it were simply a similar device, it would suggest the former, but the same name…”

“Wait, bugs?” Danny asked.

“Nothing to concern yourself with, they wear off,” Dr. Wakeman said, distractedly setting up the Cramtastic. “Still, an interesting curiosity. You must tell me if you notice any other similarities with your own dimension during your stay.”

“Oh, actually, yeah, Jenny mentioned I should talk to you about the history here? It’s… weirdly identical to the history where I’m from, at least up to a point, even though it really, really shouldn’t be, from what I can tell.”

“Ah, well, that’s simple enough to resolve,” she replied. “I’ll just add history to the program I’m setting up! Now, this device should give you everything you need to be a competent lab assistant and give understanding of Jenny’s internal components. There will be a small period of adjustment, but I’m quite confident you can handle it. Are you ready to begin?”

Danny hesitated, the desire to help Jenny and repay Dr. Wakeman at war with the bone-deep certainty that this could not be this simple. Even in this world, with tech that would make Tucker pass out from sheer joy, there’s no way something like this could exist and not be widespread if there wasn’t a catch. He knew the Cramtastic of his world got recalled later due to a not insignificant portion of users having psychotic episodes.

But, he was a hero for a reason, and that reason wasn’t to be risk averse.

“Alright then, doc. Fire it up.”

“Capital!” The doctor cried, jabbing at a keypad, before handing him the helmet. “Shouldn’t be more than five minutes. Off you go!”

With trepidation, he sat down in front of the monitors, put the helmet on his head, and waited.

And then, suddenly, he felt like his brain was caught in a vice, and he felt his body go rigid as he was bombarded with facts, figures, knowledge, at a speed too fast for him to even scream.

Nora had to admit, as she shut the machine down and Danny ceased to twitch, she felt a twinge of uncertainty about the whole endeavour. Oh, not about young Daniel’s suitability as a lab assistant, in all honesty she’d have taken him up on that even if he didn’t volunteer to use the Cramtastic in order to aid her daughter. It would just have been in a more… limited capacity.

No, her uncertainty came mostly from the fact that Danny wasn’t moving.

Oh, dear. She’d been quite sure his ectoplasm infused blood and brain would lead to a much faster absorption rate. The substance was… fascinatingly diverse in its effects, but that was most certainly what it should have done in combination with an otherwise human brain.

… Ah, she didn’t look at those equations upside down again, did she? That would be a bother. And she may have… Well, actually, that was another question she had – could Daniel die? Right now, she certainly hoped not.

She breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing a groan emerge from the helmet.

“OK,” he mumbled. “I think I get why people don’t use this all the time now. I feel like my head’s about to explode.”

“That should pass shortly,” Nora replied. I hope. “Now, a test: Where does Jenny keep her weaponry?”

“A combination of quantum compression and rapid-acting microfabrication means she doesn’t actually store anything, it is all created in situ according to need and preprogrammed patterns,” Danny rattled off in a monotone, before blinking. “Wait, what?”

“And how would one go about programming the intelligence of someone like Jenny?”

“Well, you’d have to start with a layered neural network, built according to similar principles of human brain development, and then… hey!” Danny wrenched himself from his regurgitation of data. “It worked!”

“Wonderful!” Dr. Wakeman clapped. “Last question then – can you work out how to improve Jenny’s shoulder components?”

This caused Danny to stop and think, his eyes rapidly moving left to right as though he was reading something. Which, in a way, he was. If she were reading his eye movements correctly, he seemed to be looking at Jenny’s blueprints.

This was, to Nora’s mind, the real test – he had the information, but could he apply it?

“I… Think I can?” He said, hesitantly. “I’d need access to some of the tools and materials here, but if I look at it… Yeah, yeah, that should work! Wow, I actually can do it!”

“Then you can get started on that right away, once I collect the necessary pieces for you.”

“Wow,” Danny whispered, almost to himself, his eyes once again scanning the information lodged in his brain. “Is this what it’s like being smart? ‘Cause I could get used to the average flight speed of the Sky Patrol jetpack depends on the fuel mixture, whereas for Jenny’s flight a ratio of why did I say that?”

“Ah. Well, yes, this is… broadly expected,” Nora said, eyeing the boy for any of the other side effects whilst she set up a workspace for him. Let’s see, he’d need a few small wrenches, this welder, probably this omniversal nano-printer for the fiddly bits…

“Expected?” Danny said, tinged with panic. “You expected me to go full mentat and begin reciting the final known use of the Presidential tank was in 1864, when President Lincoln-”

Danny slapped his hands across his mouth, horrified.

“Yes, expected,” Nora replied offhandedly, arranging the rest of what she thought he might need. “You see, at present the information exists purely separate from your own mind, stored outside your memory. That’s why you need to actively call it up. Your brain needs to finish assimilating everything into your knowledge banks proper, instead of as a… kind of manual you need to read. In the meantime, you’ll be… buffering, so to speak, for a while. That has some unusual effects on the brain, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed as he nodded sarcastically, his hands still over his mouth. He rose from the chair somewhat unsteadily, and cautiously removed his hands from his mouth.

“And… How long… is that going to last?” He asked, haltingly, clearly expecting his mouth to start babbling facts about history, engineering or… Nora paused, thinking. It should be programming next, but she couldn’t entirely remember what sequence the program was in.

“Oh, well, in an ordinary human, months.”

“Months?!”

“But!” She interrupted the oncoming tirade. “One of the effects ectoplasm appears to have had on your brain is a considerably faster ability to integrate and adapt to new information, so if my calculations is correct, it should be a few hours.”

“Oh,” Danny paused, face scrunched up. “Well, I guess that isn’t too bad, but you should have-”

He quite suddenly reared forward, and fell flat on his face, an audible smack rebounding from the walls. Nora paused her preparations to examine the boy on the ground.

“… Is one of the buffering effects forgetting how to walk?”

“It certainly can be.”

“Wonderful.”

Jenny, upon returning from school, was immediately suspicious.

Some of the reasons for her suspicion were subtle. Her mom wasn’t in any of her laboratories, for one. She was sat in an armchair beside the door to one, sure, but Jenny almost never came home to her doing something other than working on some new project or other. The few times she had usually meant trouble of one variety or another.

Another was that she was sipping tea somewhat daintily from a delicate china teacup. Strike two, her mom had very strict limits on when and how she drank tea, and four in the afternoon wasn’t ever on the list except when she might have to keep up with something unexpectedly.

Some of the reasons for her suspicion, however, were anything but subtle, judging from the total din of construction noises and shouting going on in the lab, coming from… was that Danny?

“Mooooom?” Jenny said, setting her school bag down and eyeing her creator. “Why is Danny destroying one of your labs and yelling about…”

She paused, cocking her head slightly to listen to the rambling.

“Why is he yelling about Newton being a hack?”

“Oh, nothing to worry about,” her mom replied. “He’s just trying to prototype something out for you. I gave him space to work for the moment. I’m quite curious to see how he does.”

“I… Didn’t think he could do that,” Jenny said, eyeing the tea drinker. “And the yelling?”

“An anticipated side-effect of attempting to absorb the theoretical minimum necessary to understand and alter your internal components. He just gave up trying to hold it in about, oh, an hour ago.”

“… What?! Mom, please tell you didn’t drag out that old learning machine thing of yours!” Jenny shouted, her arms gesticulating wildly. “The last time you tested that on Brad, he forgot how to blink for three days, and he was only learning basic calculus!”

Dr. Wakeman waved her concerns away. “Well, yes, but I’ve made adjustments since then, and my examination of Daniel’s unique physiology indicated that he’d pass through the more unfortunate side effects quickly. He’s been taking the knowledge in with great speed. In fact, about now he should be…”

“AH!” Jenny flinched as she heard Danny scream. “NOTHING MATTERS AND THERE IS NO MEANING!”

“Oh, good, he’s reached the nihilism portion of philosophy, that means he’s nearly done.”

“Philosophy?! Why did you include philosophy, mom?!”

“Well, one needs to have a firm grounding in philosophy to understand the implications and ethics of creating and altering mechanical lifeforms.”

Jenny’s eyebrow rose with an incredulous scrape. “… I think your definition of minimum is really skewed.”

“I have no idea what you mean, dear,” she replied calmly, sipping her tea.

“There is no meaning, but I can GIVE it meaning!”

“Existentialism, excellent…”

“And that meaning is to SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION!”

“And Marxism! There, that should-”

“And keep it all for ME! I AM THE ONE TRUE SPECIAL PERSON IN A SEA OF MEDIOCRITY!”

Dr. Wakeman put her tea in the saucer with a clink and frowned. “I could have sworn I took Objectivism out of the program.”

Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the crashing, banging, sparking, hissing noises emanated from the lab ceased, the last remnants of them echoing briefly. The Wakeman women listened in silence, waiting to see if it would start again. After a few seconds, the elder Wakeman pushed the table away and stood up from her chair.

“Well then!” She said cheerfully. “It sounds like he’s finished! Let’s see how he’s done.”

Jenny let her mom lead the way, pushing the door open with, in Jenny’s experienced opinion regarding her moms extremely mixed results in experimenting on her friends, undue optimism. It was just as likely they’d walk in there to find trying to cram everything you’d need to make another her (an existential notion that, not for the first time, she immediately deleted from her memory banks) meant all the information got jumbled up and he’d somehow made an evil Jenny, and then Jenny would have to beat up her evil self.

Again.

The door creaked open, and Jenny stepped through.

OK, she thought. Jumble was very much the right word.

The lab (or at least this section of it, this was one of moms big ones), was in complete disarray. Tables were upended, parts and tools were scattered all over the place, paper with hasty scribbles was everywhere. There were at least half a dozen incomplete mechanical bits that seemed like they’d been abandoned halfway through. Jenny thought she might be able to trace the development actually, each one left when the maker decided to try a different method of construction.

They went from melon to golf ball in terms of size, but somehow they all looked really… familiar to Jenny. Huh.

And of course, lying in the middle of a massive pile of debris, his limbs half covered by doodads and gadgets and tools, rubbing his head tiredly with one hand like he’d just had the biggest headache ever, was Danny.

“Hey, Doc,” Danny mumbled. “Pretty sure I’m done.”

“With the device for Jenny, or assimilating the information?”

“With being awake,” he deadpanned wearily, before removing his hand and looking around. “Oh. Oh, jeez, I’m sorry! I didn’t realise how much of a mess I was making. I just… You know, more information meant I had to restart when I learned a new idea hit, and I sometimes didn’t have motor function so I had to try the ecto-telekinesis, but that power’s never worked for me all that well. I-I’ll clean it up, I swear!”

“Relax,” Dr. Wakeman, smiling. “Believe me, young man, I know full well what it’s like when you get an idea stuck in your head and you have to work it out. And you had rather more than just one. You can tidy it in the morning. First task as lab assistant!”

“Lab assistant?” Jenny echoed.

Danny jumped, before turning to look at the robot girl, smiling. “Oh! Hey Jenny!”

“Hey Danny,” she replied, returning a small smile of her own. Darn it, he looked funny down there. “Soooo… Lab assistant, huh? How’d you go from lab assistant to…”

She gestured vaguely at everything around them. Danny winced.

“Ah. Well, uh, you know yesterday, when we were talking about bad guys and history? Well-”

“Oho!” Dr. Wakeman interrupted, picking up a small device that lay on a table. Now that Jenny’s attention was drawn to it, it was kinda weird that it wasn’t surrounded by detritus like everything else. Not to mention it looked finished, which was definitely a contrast. “I think I see what you’ve done here! Why, it’s so simple, I’m shocked I didn’t implement something like it in the current iteration! Well done, Daniel!”

“It was pretty easy once you strapped a genius machine to my head, Doc,” Danny grinned tiredly. “Gotta say, I don’t how the rest of my family does it – being smart is exhausting.”

“Can you explain quantum compression to me in your own words?” Nora asked, suddenly.

Jenny watched as Danny jolted in his pile, and opened his mouth. “Well, it’s… Uh… It’s when you use entanglement fields to… do… things?” He frowned. “Was there a glitch in that machine, Doc? Because I know the answer, but for the life of me, I can’t understand it.”

“Don’t worry, dear boy, nobody can understand quantum mechanics at first,” Dr. Wakeman reassured him, holding the device he’d created under one arm. “But it illustrates a point – the Cramtastic Mark 7 did not make you smarter.”

“… What? But I-”

“You have made a classic blunder!”

“Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line?” Danny and Jenny asked simultaneously, before turning to each other and high fiving.

“I shall assume that was from one of the movies from Daniel’s universe,” Dr. Wakeman said, rolling her eyes. “No, you have conflated knowledge with intelligence. The Cramtastic, plus your own unique physiology and metabolism, merely removed the need to study these subjects. The ability to do something with the knowledge, something like make a new, more efficient actuator for my daughter, was all a product of your own intelligence.”

Danny looked, for a moment, totally stunned. His eyes were wide, and his jaw was agape. He seemed unable to move, or stop staring at the now smug Dr. Wakeman. Then a slow smile began to spread over his face.

“I’m… I’m actually smart?”

“Well, it’s hardly surprising, given how you’ve described of the rest of your family, is it?” The spiky haired scientist replied. “Now, given your current state, I imagine you’d like to get some rest now, so tomorrow, we can go about testing this, and then, with Jenny’s consent of course, install it. And then, we can see how much you now remember and understand of your parents work, and if it can apply to our own efforts here.”

She started to stride forward, only to trip and stumble over something on the floor. She frowned. “Of course, all of that will have to wait until this is tidied up. Now to bed, young man! I’ve got to make some quick adjustments to a device for the UN, should hopefully increase arable farmland.”

Dr. Wakeman walked off, heading to a less destroyed portion of the lab, leaving the two teenage weirdos alone.

“I’m not an idiot…” Danny whispered, half to himself, a big goofy smile lighting his features.

“Danny?” Jenny asked softly. He turned to look at her, hitting her with his smile at the same time.

“Yeah, Jenny?”

“Did you… Did you volunteer to strap mom’s crazy learning machine thing to your head, just so you could build me a new shoulder part?”

“Oh,” Danny said, rubbing the back of his head in embarrassment, but still grinning. “Uh, yeah. I wanted to help you, ‘cause you’ve done a lot for me, so it kind of felt like the least I could do?”

He seemed surprised when Jenny hauled him out of the trash pile he had been sprawled out in. Before he could react to being back on his feet, and his feet functioning normally no less, two metal arms wrapped themselves ever so gently around him.

“Thank you,” Jenny whispered as she hugged him. “So much. Nobody’s ever done something like this for me before. Not just because they wanted to help me.”

“… Well, they should do,” Danny replied, his arms going around Jenny as well. As much as that was possible, of course. “We should be helping each other, otherwise what’s the point, you know? And you gave me a place to stay and a chance to get home. Far as I’m concerned, I still owe you.”

Cute. Kind. Considerate. Smart. Funny. Brave.

Jenny’s circuits suddenly flared hot in her face as the adjectives she wanted to use to describe the ghost boy come to the forefront of her mind unbidden. She quickly released him, pushing herself away, her cheeks still burning blue. Ah. She… Should maybe deal with this later. When the cute considerate smart STOP.

“Uh. Um. Anyway! I bet you wanna get some sleep now, right?”

“You said it. Who knew absorbing multiple college degrees in multiple unconnected fields could possibly be exhausting?” Danny said with a sarcastic grin, floating himself to the ceiling. “Seriously, I know she meant well, but your mom really needs to explain the side effects of these things better. G’night, Jen!”

Jenny waved at him shyly, her smile following suit, as he vanished through the ceiling, her processors throwing more at her to describe the shift in her emotions.

Sees me as a person first. Heroic. Adorable smile. Gets me and my life. Won’t be in danger from my enemies.

Jenny had watched a lot of cartoons and TV, read a lot of romance novels, that kind of thing, and something she never understood in those was how oblivious some of the characters could be. After all…

She always knew when she had a crush.

Her smile faltered, however, as something else crossed her mind.

Not from this dimension, and going home soon.

Maybe she’d talk to Brad about this at the weekend…

“Hello, welcome to Tremorton public library, how can I help you,” the bored receptionist said, not even looking up from her magazine.

“Good day!” A gratingly chipper voice replied, laced with some kind of weird echo. “I was wondering you had any material concerning the technical aspects of the, um… Cluster drones!”

“Xenotechnology, 2^nd floor, sir.”

“Thank you, peon! Soon I, TECHNUS, the master of all terrestrial gizmo’s and gadgets, shall extend his reach to the stars above! HAHAHA-”

“Hey!” The receptionist interrupted sternly, looking up at the... green man. “No shouting in the library!”

“Oh, right, sorry! Hahahahahaha!”