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Her first memories began like a half forgotten dream.
Her vision blurred before her, her eyelids heavy and refusing to stay open for long.
And a voice.
“A girl? How the hell did that happen and why is it more stable than the others?” a man’s voice demanded.
She tried to see who was speaking, but thick glass distorted everything in front of her like a funhouse mirror and her breath bubbled before her.
Was she… underwater? No, that couldn’t be right. A person couldn’t breathe like that.
A woman’s voice, both peppy and polite and yet also unnatural and emotionless in its cadence, interrupted her thoughts as it rattled off a list of things she couldn’t quite comprehend.
“Well in your search for more stability the resulting data showed you needed to go outside the mold. The extra genetic coding added clearly created a whole new person,” the woman’s voice replied.
“A new person was never the goal, dammit!” the man barked back.
The voices went back and forth, but the sound of them grew faint as her eyelids fluttered closed. Something like sleep came to her; visions of a world of swirling green watercolors, like an echo of someone else’s dreams.
She floated through the watercolor world, confusion replaced by wonder; all was a swirl of mist and light vast as an ocean and dotted with starlight.
In the distance, she could see bits of landscape, seemingly connected to nowhere, like a collection of little planets from a storybook she couldn’t quite recall the name of.
The disjointed sight before her held a sense of… comfort instead of the confusion or alarm such a scene probably should have instilled.
It felt peaceful and safe; it felt like home.
But all too soon the waking world tugged the tether it had on her mind and the starlight was traded for glaring fluorescents as she opened her eyes.
****
The first thing she was aware of when she woke up was a beeping sound.
An alarm clock? No. It was too steady and slow for that. It was something more clinical, but equally commonplace to her, though she couldn’t recall why exactly she knew it must be some kind of medical equipment.
Speaking of, the next thing she noticed was the feeling of a mask on her face and wires in her arms.
That… wasn’t right.
Her eyes snapped open and were met with a harsh white light.
She scanned the room frantically; it was bright and clinical and- was she in the hospital?
She realized the beeping was monitoring her heartbeat (should it have been that slow?) and the mask on her face was for oxygen. Something… strange was in an IV bag, dripping its way into her arm.
The substance glowed a neon green and something about it felt familiar.
As her confusion gave way to worry, the beeping of the monitor grew quicker and louder.
Everything was so bright and so loud and she longed to return to her water color world and the longing was like a hunger, working in tandem with the worry to gnaw at the pit of her stomach.
And then the door at the other end of the room flew open and a man in a lab coat stood in the doorway with a wild, worried look in his eyes, though only for the briefest moment before, like a switch being flipped, his face became calculatingly calm in an almost professionally detached sort of way.
The girl didn’t quite know what to make of the sight of him.
“Are you my doctor…?” the girl asked hesitantly, both alarmed and relieved to no longer be alone.
“No,” he said in a voice she realized she’d heard before, “I suppose you could- that is, I’m your father.”
The girl took in the sight of him as he crossed the room and took her hand in a comforting, gentle way.
The brightness of the sterile white room and its flickering fluorescents seemed to dim to a bearable level and for a moment the girl felt her drumming worry of her thoughts slow back down to a steadier rhythm.
If her father was by her side then surely she had nothing to worry about.
******
There was a lot more to getting better than she would have imagined.
Had she been sick? Her father said the tests and exercises were a part of “rehab.”
And he was a doctor, so he’d know about these things, like how he’d said that the best place to recover was at home rather than some noisy, overfilled hospital brimming with germs and misery.
(Her father seemed to have strong opinions when it came to hospitals).
She was wobbly on her feet and her muscles were weak and so many dull days passed inside her father’s dreary old house or in the bright, sterile basement where she was hooked up to wires that monitored her vitals while he took notes with that constant focused frown of his.
She hated every moment of it, but her father was insistently committed to finding the fastest possible road to recovery for her.
“A bit longer, Danielle, and we aren’t finished til you’re fighting fit,” he’d say.
That was her name, she supposed. (She didn’t care for it, she had the vague feeling it must have belonged to a relative before her. It felt borrowed, like a hand me down that’s been custom-tailored to fit someone else).
Danielle learned that she was twelve years old. She had black hair and blue eyes (her eyes matched her father’s, his hair was grey though and she wasn’t sure what color it used to be) and was somewhat short for her age.
Her father informed her that she’d been in an accident, (the details of which he’d said he would rather not go into) it must have been pretty bad, though, as she’d been informed that she had been in a coma for a number of months before the hospital had eventually released her into her father’s private care. She couldn’t remember her own experience of the accident, or much of anything really. She had some memories, sure, but they were far away and fuzzy; like recalling something caught on TV right in the middle of the story and while half asleep. She remembered things and places, but not in a way that felt like they belonged to her, or she to them. (Her father assured her this disassociation was due to “cranial trauma,” and that it would get better with time.)
However, the strangest thing to Danielle was the fact there were no people in her memories. Sure, her father was familiar, but not in the way he should be. It was like seeing someone she’d taken the same bus with and never spoken to rather than the person who must have raised her.
And as she got to know him again, right along learning her own self, Danielle saw that there seemed to be two sides to her father.
First, there was the bright, encouraging man who cheered her on when she did well at her exercises, both physical and mental, and then… then there was Doctor Masters, who would peek through when her father became lost in his work, pouring over his data for his job outside his daughter’s recovery and who seemed to forget he even had daughter if he got caught up in something, which would often result in Danielle being on her own for hours on end in their echoey, empty old house that felt like it was meant for a much larger family.
She understood, of course, that her father had to support them somehow, and she had a sense that whatever he did was terribly important (though he never cared to discuss his work very much, insisting the details would only bore her back into another small coma, which was a joke she didn’t have the heart to tell him could not possibly be less funny) but it was… unsettling, not knowing if the doting dad or the disengaged doctor was the truest side of Vlad Masters.
Danielle lived with two strangers, her father and herself.
***
When she’d gotten a little stronger, the best part of the day was when her father dismissed her so he could pour over whatever it was he worked on when he wasn’t with her.
(Their house was practically a castle, so he must’ve had quite the head for business).
In the afternoons, she’d roam through the library, pulling books at random. Sometimes it was something boring like her father’s favorite FBI action novels (which took up a disappointing amount of shelf space) and she’d put those down within the hour.
But sometimes there were books about nature, or space, or far off places, and that helped stave off her hunger for the outside world. During those times, she would dig up one of her father’s clipboards and some blank paper to sketch out the people and places she so desperately wanted to see in person, but they came out much more clumsily than she would have liked them and often times she could be surrounded by a pile of crumpled papers covered in doodles that hadn’t met her satisfaction.
One thing Danielle definitely seemed to share with her father was perfectionism.
Well, perhaps she could have done better if she had more than just the pictures in the dusty old books in front of her; at times like this, the hunger inside turned to an empty ache, like a cavity only a proper root canal could salvage.
She’d asked her father about school a few times, yet he’d always dismissed her questions, saying that her job right now was to focus on getting stronger. She was a clever kid, he said, and she’d catch up in no time.
Danielle wasn’t really worried about catching up to her peers as much as she just longed to be around them, but she knew that with her father academics always took precedence.
“Aren’t you concerned I’ll get back to school and everybody will be finding square roots and I’ll be back in the dust? You’re always saying how important a well-developed mind is,” she’d pleaded one day after he’d been away for what felt like a small eternity and she’d begun to be able to sympathize a little too well with the lone castaway in the book that had kept her company all day.
“My only concern is getting you back on your own track, little Miss; every test you’ve passed so far proves that your mind is sharp as a tack. When you’re older, you’ll thank me for sparing you every possible moment of junior high,” he’d replied in a huff without looking up from the last week’s rehab notes he’d been contrasting with the notes from that morning.
And with that, it was like a mound of dirt had been shoveled over the topic; for that day at least it was dead and done.
***
Her father’s house was a funny sort of place. It was lonely and echoey upstairs and downstairs in the lab… Well, having an accident bad enough to have to relearn things like walking must mess with your head a little, Danielle assured herself.
Her father never seemed to hear the far off sounds like someone was crying from another room. He insisted that the… things she saw from the corner of her eye were part of some kind of irregularity in her brain and whenever she brought them up he’d insisted on running more tests and having a flashlight shined in both her eyes, so telling her father what images her brain cooked up from his collection of ink blot flash cards were not Danielle’s idea of “a fun and educational way to spend an afternoon with her old man.”
So Danielle stopped calling attention to the voices she could never find the source of.
She pretended she didn’t see hands coming out of the walls, seemingly reaching blindly for help.
The only solution was to pretend her father’s house wasn’t haunted.
***
Something a bit more difficult to ignore was when the nightmares started.
One night, instead of floating through the lovely watercolor world she normally dreamed of, Danielle was met with something very different after her head hit the pillow and she closed her eyes.
In the nightmare, she felt like she was seeing through someone else’s eyes; everything was sort of blurry, like she wasn’t wearing a pair of glasses she apparently needed or… like when she tried to reach for her memories in the waking world.
She was walking into a metal tunnel, it was dark and her hands fumbled along the walls and then-
She tripped on a loose wire, her hands fumbled to steady her as she fell only to hit some kind of switch…
And then the world caught fire.
Searing green light burned in front of her eyes as what she could only imagine a lightning strike felt like crackled through the arm that hit the switch. The scream that was ripped from her throat didn’t sound like her voice, but then, it barely sounded human, it was filled with such agony.
She felt like she was going to die.
She hoped that she was going to die.
It felt like her very being was getting torn in two.
As she screamed, voices she didn’t know called desperately for “Dani” in the background, feeling a million miles away.
And then all at once, the world went black and Danielle’s eyes snapped open.
She jumped straight out of bed, her body overwhelmed with adrenaline.
Her surroundings felt unfamiliar, and wrong- everything seemed suddenly alien.
All her instincts seemed to yell “You’re not meant to be here, you’re in danger!”
Danielle ran from the room, not sure where to go or what to do as the panic overtook her mind.
She froze halfway down the hallway; her head was spinning and her heart was pounding and she just wanted-
Memories flickered across her mind’s eye, of someone with long red hair that brushed her face as they hugged her and a gentle voice that had comforted her when she was afraid; but just who that had been…
“Mom?” she choked out uncertainly, delirious with fright, “Mom please, I don’t want to be alone please!
“Please, I’m so scared.”
There was no answer to her pleas as the sound of her crying echoed off the walls of the empty hallway.
The adrenaline ran its course; her sobs grew quiet and her heart beat slower as her mind and body both agreed unconsciousness would be the best escape to this unknown and absurd sense of danger, and she crumpled slowly to the ground, curling up tightly, hugging her knees to her chest.
Danielle didn’t notice the intangible hands reaching out from nowhere in a useless attempt to comfort the crying child before them.
She didn't see her pain, her fear, being reflected by a half dozen hearts that barely existed.
***
Danielle’s exhausted mind drifted back to the world of dreams; this time, instead of the nightmares, she found herself returned to the safety and comfort of her watercolor world.
She found herself on solid ground; she sat on a cliff side and swung her feet in the empty air in front of her, looking out at a swirling ocean of onyx and emerald dotted with radiant stars that took up the entire horizon like a mix of sea and sky.
She dug her hands into the ground beneath her and breathed slowly.
Or tried to.
She kept her mind clear and tried to meditate on the sight before her.
She closed her eyes and fought for peace and control, trying to ground herself in the present moment rather than the horror she was trying to forget but her mind replayed the memory of a blinding light and a world on fire.
Danielle felt her breath shallow and heartbeat quicken. She bit her lip as she tried to hold back her tears and keep control of herself the way her father had told her to on days when testing hadn’t gone well.
When she stumbled while reminding her legs how to walk, Danielle’s father had told her that her only limit was her own willpower; if she just applied herself enough, then nothing but herself could hold her back.
It hadn’t been a very encouraging lesson, and he wasn’t there to see her stumble again.
Her shoulders started shaking and Danielle let the tears fall.
Her dark hair hung over her face like a curtain as she let out every bit of pain and frustration and fear that she’d inherited with her collection of hazy, distant memories.
She let herself get so lost in it all that she didn't even notice someone quietly approaching.
“Hey there, are you alright, kid?” A boy’s voice asked gently, “I don’t think I’ve seen you around this part of the zone before. Are you lost maybe or…?”
Danielle almost fell from where she sat when he put a hand on her shoulder.
She stood and spun around to face the… stranger? No. No, something about him was familiar- the slope of his nose, the shape of his eyes. He was older than her, by a few years maybe, but he reminded her so much of-
***
When Vlad stumbled upstairs to bed at 3 in the morning, the last thing he’d expected was to nearly trip over a body.
But lo and behold, there was the little girl, laying on the carpet like a lost dog or a wayward dust bunny. Vlad wasn’t one to startle easily but the surprise was enough to draw out a string of rather choice swears.
Well shit, this was definitely the last thing he wanted to deal with after spending the better part of his evening losing a fight to a punkass teenager.
He bent down to take her vitals; her pulse was stable, which was a comfort, her breathing was deep and steady, and her eyes moved behind their lids in a way that told him she’d somehow managed to reach a REM state even when sleeping on the damn floor.
(He knew he didn’t have the most encyclopedic knowledge on the psychology of child raising, but hell, this was odd even for his household).
“Up we go,” he muttered, scooping her into his arms and over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Well, he’d expected worse instabilities, and so far this one had proved more steady than her elder ‘brothers’- less prone to, well, melting down.
“Some scientist, forgetting to prepare for an anomaly outside of regular testing,” he grumbled to himself as he turned back down the stairs, it was going to be a longer freaking night than he’d thought.
***
Far off memories of Vlad’s younger days scrabbled for his attention as he set up machines and monitors with what scraps of energy he had left. The beeping of the heart monitor, the glaring lights; it was all as familiar as if the “accident” had been yesterday.
All that time in the hospital had led him away from the lab and into the world of business, which had been much more of a success than the research that had left him, well, more or less dead to the world.
For friends to move on without him, one of which had been the girl he’d loved, oh that had hurt enough.
But the incident had left him a different person entirely. A different… something. Something other and in between and wrong.
Maddie and Jack had their opinions on the subjects of their collective research, all the more reason for Vlad to keep his distance. For people in such a ridiculed field, they were certainly goddamn stubborn when it came to challenging their own preconceived notions.
But it was fine, he didn’t need them. Walking the line between life and death had its advantages and he’d certainly learned to use them for all they were worth. Just look at where he’d ended up! On top of the world, wealthy, respected, and… alone.
Until the day his godson came back into his life.
Suddenly he wasn’t the only one anymore! Here was this kid, sharp as a tack just like Maddie and a survivor just like Vlad.
Well, if life were fair, the boy would’ve been his in the first place. He’d see how, one way or another, that Jack (and hell, even Maddie) would never understand the way Vlad did- and what more could someone like them want beyond acceptance from the only person across an infinite number of realms who could truly understand?
Subject 7.04 shifting in her sleep interrupted his thoughts.
Vlad sighed as he sank down in the chair beside her.
Desperate people did desperate things.
***
“…Dad?” The froggy voice woke Vlad with a start, he opened his eyes to see 7.04 squinting at him blearily, “Did something happen?”
Good lord, it sounded like she’d spent his absent hours screaming her head off with how shot her voice was. Well maybe she was coming down with something? Kids were always getting sick, weren’t they?
But as Vlad recalled the state he’d found her in, flat on the floor with tears staining her cheeks, he could deduce it had likely been the first option.
Instabilities were to be expected.
“That’s what I was going to ask you, kiddo,” he said tiredly, running a hand over her hair (physical reassurance was supposed to build trust, he’d always remembered that from a psychology course he’d taken right before he’d set up his business- though in such cases a firm handshake had done the trick).
She eyed him skeptically in a way that reminded him so much of Maddie (well, that would track, considering), tilting her head just so and raising an eyebrow.
“I found you outside your room,” he explained, “Any idea how you got there?”
She pondered the question a moment, her eyes unfocused in a very disconcerting way. “I think… I think I had a nightmare,” she explained quietly.
Now it was his turn to look skeptical, he hadn’t expected the instability to be psychological, but again, that would track considering...
“About what?” He pressed.
7.04’s lip began to tremble and she shook her head slightly.
Ah, this was a matter for that “gentle parenting” he’d been reading about.
“Hey, you know you can tell me anything, right?” he said softly, taking her hand in his.
She didn’t meet his eyes, but nodded silently.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly, already reading six am. Well, he’d cleared his schedule for the day while she’d been unconscious; he had time, it was patience that he was short on.
A few minutes passed in the relative silence of the ticking clock and beeping machines and he was almost asleep again when she finally spoke.
“Dad?” She asked hesitantly, “Do I… have a brother?”.
A brother? The words hit Vlad’s already exhausted mind like a bullet.
It caught him so off guard he briefly wondered if 7.04 was becoming as destabilized as her predecessors.
But no… There would have been other indicators for something of that magnitude and Vlad had been sure to correct every conceivable flaw or error that had occurred with the previous experiments.
Still, 7.04 had only proven to have the vaguest traces of Daniel’s memories- she shared things like his fascination with space and would occasionally reference knowledge of certain subjects without recalling any contextual experiences.
She shouldn’t have had any “exterior” memories of him.
Well, from a purely biological standpoint there was the fact that Vlad had needed to reinforce some genetic weak points which had led to the breakdown of the other clones and he had done so by electing to use some of his own DNA (because perhaps strengthening the ghostly aspect would lead to less physical strain and eventual breakdown) as well as Maddie’s (for someone Daniel actually shared genes with- another possible stabilizer). So yes, all ectoplasmic contaminants ignored, the two of them could be considered brother and sister; half siblings so to speak.
Perhaps Daniel’s memories weren’t the only ones she was drawing on? That was a concerning prospect.
“What makes you ask that, Danielle?”
Perhaps it came out a bit more sharply than he’d intended, as she simply shook her head again instead of replying.
Really, he hadn’t gotten nearly enough rest to have the patience for mind reading and-
Dammit, were those tears in her eyes?
Right. Gentle parenting.
Vlad rubbed his eyes and tried to choose his next words with a little more care.He was a businessman after all, he knew how to spin the truth for his own advantage.
“…That isn’t a no then, is it, Dad?” She muttered before he had the chance to speak.
Dammit, this one was actually clever.
“Your brother… Lives with your mother and her husband, and his other sister- ah, your half sister, in another city,” he said finally, “He and I didn’t quite see eye to eye following the accident.”
There, it wasn’t a lie; she didn’t need to know the accident in question had been Daniel’s own portal incident and the parting of ways had been decidedly after and entirely unrelated.
“How come you never even mentioned him, Dad? And this is the first time you’ve even mentioned mom having a whole other family!” 7.04 exclaimed, a mix of anger and grief tingeing her words.
“It wouldn’t have served any purpose in aiding your recovery to know the fractured state of our relationship, Danielle; the last thing you needed was any further traumatic experiences,” he said cooly.
She narrowed her eyes and was silent for a moment.
Daniel had given him that exact look before- disdain and disgust written plainly across his face.
“What’s his name? Can you at least tell me that much?” She asked.
His name.
How the hell had Vlad never considered adding two extra letters for what he called 7.04 might present an issue? Wait, what was that idiocitc nickname they had for him in Amity Park?
“His name is Bill,” he replied.
***
Anger and confusion pounded through Danielle’s head.
She had a brother and a mom for that matter, who had left to start a whole other family, and her dad didn’t think it was important enough to tell her about?? He’d been hesitant even to tell her her brother’s name, what the heck else could he be hiding?
“Danielle, I more than understand that you’re upset-“
“No, I don’t think you do understand, Dad!” Danielle exclaimed, cutting her father off, “Did you think I was too delicate to handle them leaving, or too stupid to wrap my head around it? You probably still think that because you haven’t even told me why!”
She sat up in the bed, fighting the urge to rip the IV of that strange green medicine out of her arm.
“Everything I’ve done- everything I do is for the good of this family, young lady!” her father protested.
“What’s left of it! You didn’t even tell me mom had left, just that it was ‘just the two of us;’ those were your exact words. This whole time I just assumed she’d been in the accident too and didn’t wanna press you about it, but nope, she’s out there somewhere with Bill and their shiny new family!” she retorted, practically shouting now.
“Danielle, be rational and calm down, your condition isn’t stable at the moment,” he said sternly, reaching a hand out for hers.
No, it probably wasn’t; her heart felt ready to beat out of her chest, her pulse pounding in her ears. She couldn’t trust her father, that was suddenly and frightfully clear. Not with him hiding so much, not with him keeping so many secrets.
“Rational? That went out the window when you decided my life was classified information!” she growled, wrenching her hand away from his.
But instead of pulling away it went through his.
“What…?” Danielle murmured, jumping out of the bed and holding her hand like she’d been burned.
She backed away slowly, standing against the farthest wall- slipping through the farthest wall. And fell to the ground on the other side, her mess of tangled hair fell in front of her eyes and instead of black it was a pure snow white, and all she could do was stay frozen in place, staring wide eyed in horror as the question of who she was turned into the question of what she was.
***
The time it took for her father to reach her felt like an eternity and his words felt far away as she stared at, or rather through her hands.
She listened numbly as he finally recounted just what exactly had happened during the accident; Danielle shouldn’t have been alive and it turned out she wasn’t quite- not properly anyway.
That incident in the lab, the searing, soul splitting pain, the voices screaming for Dani, it had been the night a part of her had died.
Her father didn’t know how much of the accident she now remembered and she certainly didn’t care to share it with him at the moment; he knew the science of it all and that helped the pieces of the puzzle click into place.
Ghosts were real, she was one of them. Almost. Her father was an expert in the matter, an area of study he’d shared with her mother during their college days (though their opinions on the matter differed greatly, just one of the things that had led to the distance between them).
Danielle listened without interrupting, she didn’t even know what questions she could have asked in a situation like this.
He didn’t tell her because why the hell would she believe something like this without proof? Even with her missing memories there was still a basis of what reality should be.
It made sense.
It should have made sense.
Within an hour or so, she was back to normal; there was a decided shift in the air and suddenly she felt… normal again? More solid at least. More real. A look in the mirror showed her hair was back to its usual black (she wasn’t sure what else might have changed when she was on the other end of the in-between, she hadn’t dared to see).
She didn’t argue when her father ran more tests, she replied listlessly when asked to describe the experience;
Was the shift painful? How did she feel now? Could she remember her name? What about today’s date?
No. Tired. Danielle Masters. Was it still Sunday? She couldn’t tell since there were no windows in the lab. (The last answer almost resulted in a brain scan before her father realized he hadn’t told her how long she’d been unconscious the night before).
It was a week before he left her alone, taking all his business calls at home on the grounds that her condition needed to be monitored.
When seven days had finally inched by without incident, Danielle was finally left in the relative peace of solitude once more.
Well, relative solitude.
The… apparitions were still there; silent and solemn with their shadowy figures, void of any defining features except for their burning green eyes.
If ghosts were real then surely these were some of them, but still her father never acknowledged them.
On the eighth day after the accident, Danielle decided it was time for her to do just that.
They liked to hide around corners, or sometimes even partially inside the walls, hands slowly waving as if to beckon her towards some mystery.
With her father departed for the day, Danielle gathered her courage and rounded the corner, where one of the shadowy figures stood like it had sensed her intentions and awaited her arrival.
“Um, hello,” she called awkwardly.
The figure tilted its head as if puzzled, but listening.
“I’m Danielle- but you probably know that. I’m… a ghost too. Sort of. That’s what you are, isn’t it?” she said, her voice low and even as though she was speaking to a wild animal that might be spooked at any moment.
The figure’s eyes widened, as if surprised to be noticed and it moved- it floated closer.
“Um, do you have a name? Would you tell me where you all came from and why my dad acts like you don’t exist? Do you know anything about… well, what the heck is going on around here?” she pressed, already losing any sense of being as cool, calm, or collected as she intended.
The figure’s lamplight eyes narrowed, as if it were puzzled, and it shook its head slowly.
“Oh. Oh, sorry, I guess that was a lot to ask, huh?” Danielle mumbled, her face growing hot and her eyes suddenly taking in her shoes in great detail.
She should have known; whatever- whoever this was or had been was too far gone to be-
Suddenly the other ghost drifted closer still, and reached out a hand which went right through her own as she tried to take it.
The figure shook its head, clearly frustrated, and gestured for her to follow as it drifted away once more- in the direction of her father’s lab.
***
Aside from the times spent in her makeshift hospital room, mostly only halfway conscious as mysterious medicines had dripped their way into her veins, Danielle had never been in the lab on her own.
Her father had told her his research was too important to risk interference or contamination and that she was to remain upstairs in his absence.
But here she was, flipping on the fluorescent lights as the silent specter urged her forward.
“… Now what?” She asked after a moment.
Her companion floated forward through the nearest door, one Danielle had never seen the other side of before, poking a hand out to wave her inside.
As she tried to follow, she was disappointed to find the handle wouldn’t turn. “Um, I hate to break it to you, but the door is locked,” she called.
The ghost poked its head out the door, moving to grab Danielle by the wrist as if to drag her inside, and when that didn’t work, coming fully back out and standing next to her, closing its eyes and tapping a foot as if thinking on the matter.
“I don’t suppose you could unlock it from inside?” Danielle sighed.
In reply the ghost simply waved a hand through the door as it maintained eye contact as if to say, “What do you think, Dummy?”
“It was rhetorical, Smarty Pants,” she muttered.
She could think of a few other things to call it, but that wouldn’t be productive; plus, who knew how close this particular spirit was to becoming a vengeful one?
“Of course Dad would have a creepy mysterious room in his creepy secret lab,” she grumbled as she thunked her head against the locked door.
“Honestly, what a fruitloo-“ any further complaints were cut off as Danielle phased through the door and landed face first on the other side.
Oh right, that was something she could do too.
As she stood up she found herself in a cavernously large room, fluorescent lights clicking on as if motion activated. Strange tubes of some kind, filled with liquid and large enough to fit a person ran along one wall while another was filled with lab equipment, a multitude of machines and vials and what she guessed were chemical compounds that all had a medical sort of look about them.
The specter floated along next to Danielle, its emerald eyes wide in an anxious looking way.
“What exactly in here did you want to show me?” Danielle whispered, irrationally afraid of being caught even though her father had said he was going into the city and wouldn’t be back until late that night.
The ghost pointed to the other end of the room, where a large computer with several monitors was situated on a desk scattered with books and papers filled with formulas and facts that Danielle could only guess were related to whatever was going on with all the lab equipment.
As she approached, a cheery, robotic, familiar voice called out, “Genetic signature detected! Good afternoon, Vlad, how may I be of assistance?”
Danielle stumbled back, colliding with the specter (an unpleasant, staticky feeling like being doused with ice water while having all four limps asleep).
“Geughhh, ok let’s never do that again,” she choked, shaking the pins and needles out of her arms.
If it were possible for a ghost to roll its eyes this one did; pointing to the computer again with an air of exasperation.
“Alright, down to business, I know. How do we even get this thing to explain what all this equipment is for?” Danielle huffed.
As the ghost shrugged back at her, the computer once again piped in, “Key phrase detected! ‘Explain what this equipment is for,’ would you like to see the files on Project Gemini?” it chirped.
Danielle looked uncertainly at the ghost, who nodded emphatically.
“Pull and read all files on Project Gemini,” she replied, her voice shaking a bit.
“Simplify to layman’s terms wherever possible,” she added.
“Summarizing files! Please stand by,” the computer confirmed, as a series of pop ups and loading tabs cluttered the screens.
***
“From the files of Doctor Vlad Masters:
On May 13th, 200X a genetic sample from the half ghost known as Phantom was obtained. Doctor Masters used this material as a basis for what would be known as Project Gemini: Marking the first ecto-biological attempt at cloning.”
Danielle and the specter watched as several files worth of text flashed across the screen, before slowing to show accompanying images.
“Attempt 8.05, successful at replication of cells; not enough genetic material for true replication.”
It went on like this for some time, showing images of Petri dish slides of ectoplasm and blood cells before eventually reaching video segments.
“July 22nd, 200X, the first true specimen was produced. Subject 1.0 achieved a fully formed body for 24 hours, but did not achieve a conscious state. On its 26th hour of existence it began to physically degenerate before eventually breaking down,” the computer announced, its cheerful tone not faltering.
“Why on earth would he do something like this…?” Danielle gasped, as more images of various copies of a very familiar looking young man in various states, some of which apparently… degenerated enough that the ghost moved in front of the screens to block them from Danielle’s view, stubbornly narrowing its eyes at her when she tried to snake around it for a better look.
“How am I supposed to get what’s happening if you’re in the way?” She asked.
The ghost crossed its arms and shook its head again, but the air of bravado quickly left it as the computer chimed,“Subject 7.03, documented by Doctor Masters as ‘by far the most successful.’ Play video files from this experiment?”
“Play video!” Danielle said, making a shooing motion even though the ghost had already began drifting to the other side of the room.
She’d realized now that the videos showed the boy from her dream- and she had to know why she’d known his face from outside of it.
“This is Doctor Vlad Masters,” her father’s voice said, tinged with exhaustion and a hint of delirium, “After months of work, the supplemental DNA provided has rendered the first solid attempt at a functional clone of Amity Park’s Phantom. It has been over 24 hours and the subject has remained stable; there may actually be… Hope for this project- to have another half-ghost who hasn’t already been poisoned against me by the likes of Jack Fenton. Who could actually help me achieve the family I’ve always-“
Vlad was interrupted as somewhere in the distance the sound of frightened, wordless yelling could be heard distantly.
“Playing next recording!” The computer announced as Danielle noticed the ghost sinking to the floor at the edge of the room.
The next video showed Vlad looking decidedly worse for the wear, completely disheveled with a large bandage across his forehead and a black eye to go with it- like he’d been on the losing end of a fight.
Danielle turned away from the screen and looked at the ghost as it curled up with its knees to its chest, as the shadows began to darken around it and semi-visible hands began reaching out from the walls and floor around it.
“Damn it all! Subject 7.03 has proven- The damned thing couldn’t- wouldn’t calm down or be reasoned with. All its previous testing indicated that this specimen should have had full mental faculties at its disposal! Whatever disconnect there may have been between its brain and vocal chords surely would have been something that might have been fixed if it hadn’t gained consciousness in full fight or flight mode- somehow resisting all attempts at tranquilization. I tried to explain. I tried… The combination of the use of the clone’s ghost powers and… it sustaining an injury when I acted in self defense after it attacked me led to full physical breakdown. Subject 7.03’s core burned a hole through its chest. Project Gemini has one more attempt in its incubation stage which has been provided with even more supplemental genetic material in a final attempt at stabilization.”
Danielle reached out for the ghost in spite of the fear she felt as the shadows grew and the lights began to flicker.
“Are you… Are you 7.04 then?” she asked hesitantly.
The ghost shook its head and looked up to meet her eyes as it pointed a finger at her.
On the screen another video began to play.
“A girl? How the hell did that happen and why is it more stable than the others?” Vlad’s voice demanded.
Danielle turned around, watching in horror as she saw herself on the screen in a video the computer labeled:
Subject 7.04 (first successful clone of Daniel J. Fenton), Early Days.