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Maddie grinned as they closed in on the ghostly menace. For months, they had tried to end Phantom, but they had never been able to hit it hard enough, so it always escaped. However, recently, Jack and her had made a breakthrough in anti-ghost weaponry. Finally, they were able to create a weapon powerful enough to rip a ghost apart, molecule by molecule. Appropriately, they called it the Fenton Ghost Peeler.
Maddie could so clearly remember the tests for the Peeler, the culmination of many sleepless nights working in the lab. The ghost they had tested it on—Danny took to calling them blob ghosts, much too cute of a nickname for such vile monsters—had almost immediately burst, becoming a puddle of inert ectoplasm. After running several calculations and fine calibrations, she was absolutely positive that, upon contact with Phantom, the Peeler would incapacitate it and leave it just intact enough to dissect.
“I’ve got it aimed, Mads!” Jack called out to her from the GAV’s roof.
“Hold on, Jack,” Maddie called out as she set the GAV to autopilot. “I’ll join you!”
Clambering up to join Jack, Maddie was glad that she took over aiming the Peeler—Jack, bless his heart, was an absolutely awful shot. He was much better in close quarters, overpowering his opponent.
Maddie carefully primed and aimed the innocuous looking blaster, levelling her breathing as she tried to remain steady in spite of the GAV’s shaky driving. She activated the Peeler, which quickly expanded into a suit that fit her body perfectly, and fired.
A silent beam of bright, ectoplasm-green energy exited the barrel at impossibly high speeds and just barely nicked Phantom, but it was enough.
Phantom let out an awful screech. The sound made Maddie’s ears pop and she winced, but, as she had hoped, the ghost was dropping through the sky like a dead weight.
“Get it in the net, quickly!” Maddie commanded Jack eagerly. If she had been younger, she might have been bouncing on her feet, clapping with excitement.
“I got it!”
For once, Jack’s aim went true, and Phantom was swept up neatly into an ectoranium net (a very costly invention, but well worth it).
“We’ve got him Jack!” Maddie grinned, allowing herself a single fist pump. “Now, let’s get him back to the lab.”
Danny couldn’t believe it. Somehow, his parents had managed to make a successful weapon and, before he could sabotage it, brought it into the field. Danny didn’t even know what it was called. He knew what it did, though.
When Mom had been aiming the deceptively normal-looking blaster at him, Danny hadn’t tried too hard to dodge it—after all, it was just a synthetic ectoblast! Those stung, sure, but his parents always returned home happier when they had “almost got the ghost boy,” so what was the harm in a few close calls?
As the blaster suddenly expanded into a combat suit and its laser had hit his shoulder, Danny began to realise how bad he had miscalculated.
The blast burned through him, rending his ectoplasmic flesh apart with jagged, burning claws. The initial area of contact melted, ectoplasm dripping onto his arm and side as it lost the form that made it a part of his body. Danny let out a hoarse, ragged scream, filled with horrible agony that couldn’t be expressed in the human vocal range. The scream seemed almost resonant, bouncing around the city and tangibly filled with his pain.
Danny quickly lost awareness and plummeted to the ground like a dead weight (ha!), barely able to move as an ectoranium net bundled him up in some cruel facsimile of a hug. He hit the ground at a ridiculously high speed for a being that only listened to gravity on a good day; if he had been in human form, the breath would have been punched from his lungs, but luckily, he didn’t have lungs as a ghost. Danny wasn't sure what organs, if any, he had, to be honest.
Hearing his parent’s conversation as they hauled him into the back of the GAV and back home, Danny was sure that he would find out soon enough.