Gravitational Phantoms: After the Storm

Chapter Twenty One: Recovery (Part Two)

Well, it looks like this sequel is actually going to be longer than the original story. How about that...

I hope that everybody had a happy Halloween and got wonderfully sick off of candy. I went as zombie Dipper, and my friend went as zombie Pacifica. It was really fun, even if it was pouring down rain for most of it. But after it lightened it a drizzle it was great!

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In a flash, the girl-Dani-had pulled away from the three and was aiming an ectoblast at Mabel's leg. If they tried to attack her, she could make sure that at least one of them wouldn't be able to follow her, but the wound wouldn't be fatal.

She narrowed her glowing green eyes at them. "How do you know my name?"

"Whoa, whoa!" Mabel held up her hands in the universal sign of surrender. "We're not bad guys! We're friends with Danny-er, Danny with a 'y.' He told us about you."

"You're Danny's friends?" Dani asked suspiciously. "Prove it."

"Uh," Dipper looked at Wendy in confusion. "How are we supposed to do that?"

"Tell me something about him. That you would only know by actually sitting down and talking to him."

Wendy half shrugged. "Okay, I guess. He wants to be an astronaut, he has a sort-of pet dog named Cujo, his nemesis is Vlad Masters/Plasmius, his best friends were named Sam and Tucker, and he hates toast. Good enough for you?"

Dani's eyes flicked between the three before her ectoblast powered down back into her palm. "I guess..." Then her eyes widened. "But if you're Danny's friends, does that mean that you know where he is?"

The Halfa sounded incredibly hopeful, and Mabel wondered how long she had been searching for him.

"Yeah, we do," Dipper assured her. "He's safe. We... We can take you to him if you want."

Dani's face lit up. "Really?"

"Yup." Mabel grinned and wrapped one of her arms around the ghost girl's shoulders, giving her a small side hug. Dani practically jumped out of her skin. "I'm sure that he'll be really happy to see you."

She wasn't lying-Dani was basically Danny's only living blood family that wasn't arguably insane. And if the clone had been looking for her "cousin" for this long, surely he had wanted to as well?

Mabel suddenly felt a small wave of guilt roll over her as she realized that they had never even offered to help the ghost boy look for Dani.

Dipper coughed softly into his fist. "Er, Dani? If you're going to come with us, you should either go invisible or change back to your human form. We don't want to give any tourists a heart attack."

The female halfa looked at him for a long moment like she was deciding whether of not she could trust them before letting the bright white ring of light encircle her waist.

Dani's human form was small, only a little bit taller than Mabel (who was still the alpha twin). Her now black hair was still pulled back into a ponytail, and her once-green eyes were the same blue that Danny's were. There was a red beanie perched on her head, and it was surprisingly clean, unlike the tattered blue hoodie she was wearing. A pair of jeans completed the look, and Dani tilted her head at the twins and Wendy.

"Now take me to Danny."

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In the weeks after he and Mabel were taken by the Guys in White, Danny's nightmares spiked in frequency and realism. It was only to be expected, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with the fact that on any given night Danny might make it halfway across the forest before he realized that he was safe.

Mabel had them too, although Dipper was usually the one to calm her down seeing as they were still sleeping in the same room. The male twin refused to leave his sister's side for any longer than he had to-especially at night, when bad dreams often kept both of them awake.

For Danny, the job usually fell to Ford or Wendy.

Whenever Danny left the Shack, he was always watched out for. Wendy had a small group of pixies that always knew generally where he was, and there was still that tracker bracelet on his wrist.

They weren't going to risk losing him again.

Currently, Danny was reading. Any of the kids at his old school who knew about his grades would be utterly shocked, at least until they saw that the book he was reading was actually about ghosts and how they were related-or, more accurately, how they were unrelated-to monsters.

That was when Mabel marched into the room with a satisfied grin on her face.

"Danny, can you come to the front for a minute?" She asked, although it was more the kind of question that you said to be polite and weren't really expecting an answer other than "yes."

The ghost boy nodded and set his book aside, folding down the corner of the page so he could find it later. He stood up from the chair and winced as the bandaged wound on his chest painfully protested the movement.

"What's in the front?" He asked the smaller teenager. "Another one of your monster sweaters?"

"No, that's not going to be done for another few days," Mabel said, sounding slightly disappointed. Then she brightened. "Actually, someone's here to see you."

Danny tensed and stopped walking. "A-are they-"

"Naw, they're fine," Mabel insisted. Her chocolate brown eyes darkened as a shadow passed over her face. "If they ever came back, you would be the first to know. Promise."

She crossed her heart and kept walking, pushing open the door that still read "Employees Only" on it.

In the front, in the room that used to be the giftshop, was someone that Danny hadn't seen in far to long.

Of course, he didn't get to stare for too long before they let out a small cry of delight and pounced on him, straddling his chest and making his eyes go blurry with the pain. But he was too happy to care, even though he knew that he probably would later.

Danielle wrapped her blue hoodie-clad arms around him and poked his cheek like she wanted to make sure that he was real.

The only other good half ghost in the world laughed from her place on top of him.

"You're real!"

"Yeah," Danny laughed. "Yeah, I am."

Later, he could explain things to her with help from the twins, Wendy, and Ford. But right now, he just needed to spend some time with his clone.