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Entry tags:

Open Log

Who: Danny and Anyone
Where: Gym Car
When: Jelly 29
What: Just hanging out practicing your ghost powers. As you do.

There were a lot of things Danny liked about his life here on the train. No ghosts to fight, no ghost hunters hunting him, no classes to worry about failing because he was too busy fighting ghosts and avoiding hunters....

The lack of space wasn't one of them. Flying was one of his favorite things about his powers, and there really wasn't anywhere here that he could push himself into any kind of speed. It really sucked on the days he was feeling a little restless.

Which may explain why he was currently flying laps around the ceiling of the gym car. Upside down.

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Danny gives her a curious look.

"Uh... that kind of describes every castle I've been to."

Mostly in the Ghost Zone, but Vlad's mansion in Wisconsin absolutely counted.

Oh. Whoops.

Dairine offers him a wry look, "And here I thought I was being specific. Does the name Paradisa ring a bell?"

"Unless that's another name for Pariah's Keep? Can't say it does."

"Nah, it's not. At least not unless there's two Cair Paradisas out there." Which she would very much rather if that wasn't the case. Bad enough that there were other castles on that world of the same 'species' as Paradisa.

She shrugs. "Honestly I'm not surprised. Don't worry about it."

...Because that's not at all worrying.

"Uh... Is there something I should be worried about here?"

Dairine assesses Danny with narrowed eyes, trying to judge how well he would take the real reason for her questioning. She didn't know him as well as she did Conan, not by a long shot. But given his somewhat blasé reaction to dubious castles, he might not freak out too badly from the truth.

Worth a shot, right?

"Depends how worried you'd be by wonky memory or time shenanigans."

Danny makes a face.

"I should probably be worried at how used I am to both. That's like a typical week back home."

Well, that was promising.

"Maybe, but at least it'll make train life easier."

"Before I was here, I got grabbed by a sentient castle. It was kinda a similar experience to the train, with people pulled from all over space and time to live there. I'm pretty sure I saw you there."

"....huh. I don't remember that happening? But I guess it could have been me in a different timeline? Or a clone? Or something."

Don't ask why those are the first ideas to come to mind.

"Or you haven't reached that point in time yet. Or the trip back to your world wiped away those memories. Who can say."

She shrugs, not looking too bothered by his lack of memories. At least not outwardly.

"You're hardly the first person I've seen from there who doesn't remember the castle. Even when I was there, sometimes residents would go back home and return without any memories. Most folks thought Paradisa would wipe our memories when we left, in order to keep anyone from noticing something was off."

But that did leave the question of why some still remembered. Like herself.

"Eh, all technically possible. Or maybe Clockwork's trolling me again. Or someone wished away the memories. It happens."

Dairine gives him an odd look.

"You're a lot more calm about this than most folks." Like... worryingly so?

"Not that the others tend to disbelieve me, but there's usual a bit more... bewilderment."

"Most people don't have my life," he says grimly. "In the past two years I've time traveled multiple times,lost all of my memories at least once, been cloned several times and ran into a shapeshifting ghost who decided to pretend to be me for a day. And that was before I left my world."

"Oof." That is... a lot. "Sounds rough. I've been pretty busy back on my world, but I haven't really messed around with time or memory loss. Though I did clone myself once."

Not that it was permanent. And she's not commenting on the shapeshifter thing. Who knows if the mix of aliens and wizards she's met would count.

"But the experience does seem to help adjust to this environment."

Danny waves it off.

"I figured I was pretty much out of luck for ever having a normal life after the interdimensional portal in my basement opened up. And thats not counting all the crazy the ghosts brought. It does mean that none of what has happened here really feels that weird. "

"Eh, normal's overrated anyway. Can't say I was having a great time as an average school student before picking up wizardry." Not that her grades were anything like average, but that hardly meant she was having fun.

...Hang on.

"Wait, you had a worldgate just show up in your basement one day? How'd you explain that to your family?"

"My parents built it."

"Oh."

What little Dairine remembers hearing about Danny's parents was... not great. Probably not the kind of details he wanted a stranger to know, so she won't be jumping to share.

"Part of their work?"

"Try their life's work. They worked on the thing for twenty years."

Danny had a lot of conflicting feelings about the portal. On the one hand it was without a doubt his parents proudest accomplishment.It was a gateway to a dimension that he had slowly started to consider a kind of second home.

But it had also technically killed him. And definitely changed what life he had left.

"Huh."

This is getting increasingly awkward, given she already knows his parents are ghost hunters, but doesn't want to jump into what had previously proven an extremely weighty topic.

"So did they make it with science? Magic?"

A fair question to ask in this place.

"Close. They're ghost scientists. I'm pretty sure magic isn't a thing in my world. Unless you count ghost magic."

"Are ghosts magical? Last I heard they were more like the land remembering past events."

Some would argue that is one and the same. But wizardry blurs the lines between the natural and the mystical.

"Ghosts aren't magic, but there are magic ghosts? I know a genie ghost, and there are weird ghost artifacts that do things like turn people into dragons. There's even a whole mythology realm."

And yes, he was aware of how little sense that made.

Dairine doesn't seem that weirded out by it.

"Huh. I guess I haven't had that much experience with ghosts. I didn't stick around Ireland for very long."

Perhaps if she hadn't been so busy (or trying to keep her trips hush-hush from her parents), she could have seen the ghosts with Nita.

"What does Ireland have to do with anything?"

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