The Superstition Spectrum (Danny Phantom)

Chapter 11

"What do we do? Oh my god, Seersh, what do we do?" Camry exclaimed, her fists pressing hard enough to leave bruises on her bony sternum. "The witches-- why would they take him--? We need to rescue him! We have to find where they're hiding a-and get him back!"

"I know, I know!" Saoirse answered, a grimace evident in her expression. "Ugh-- hold on, I feel sick." The sight of their best friend exploding into vapors had undoubtedly taken a toll on her, well, constitution. 

"Are you okay?" Camry asked quickly as she put a concerned hand on her girlfriend's shoulder. 

Saoirse waved a hand flippantly, though she was looking a little worse for wear. "Y-Yeah, don't-- don't worry about me. We need to hurry and find Dude." 

~~

When he woke up after only four or five hours of sleep, Dude was already geared up and raring to get back to work. The speed at which he was learning spells and incantations was borderline greedy, though his enthusiasm certainly imbued the entire house with a similar energy of "Go go go!" Kordelle, as tired as he was, was over the moon with his friend being so eager to get his hands on their shared heritage. 

Allie's lessons on botany and herbology in potions was the first thing he jumped into after rising from the couch a little before noon. Because he had absorbed information from a few potion texts the night before, he wanted to put his new knowledge into action. Kordelle took the opportunity to lock himself in his room for a while to nap and avoid the stenches wafting up from the kitchen. As much as he wanted to personally guide Dude's learning, he also didn't want to be stuck with a migraine for the rest of the day, so it was a necessary sacrifice. 

Allie's lesson ran for a number of hours as potion-making can be a rather tedious and lengthy process, which left Kordelle with plenty of time to buckle down with his own collection of magical tomes. However, as he was perusing a few of the old annotations he had made to a book on brain anatomy and holding a bandana over his mouth and nose, Kordelle heard a faint buzzing coming from somewhere in his room. His heart skipped a beat before his better judgment could assure him that it just sounded like a cell phone. 

However, when he looked to his left he saw that his phone was charging where it always did on the night stand, dormant as per the usual. Whose phone was doing that, then? 

'Oh' he realized, and with barely a hesitant thought he lurched forward off of his bed and started peering around the stacks of books that Dude had left like mines in a minefield all around his room the night before. Kordelle finally found it nestled in between two pages of a book on spatial matter spells-- a rather advanced discipline of magic, he noted with praise-- and saw that Dude had just missed a call from a contact labeled as "Camcorder" with the jack-o'-lantern and dancing lady emojis next to it. 

'Is this Camry?' Kordelle wondered with a pensive frown. Then he saw the time displayed on the phone's lock screen-- it was well after school was supposed to be over, so it would make at least a little bit of sense for her to be calling at this time of day. 

But what reason would she have to call? Had they made plans that Dude never showed up for? 'No, I told him to cut off contact with them' he reasoned. 'Though I wouldn't put it past him to forget about any sort of plans he may have made, especially after everything that happened last night.' 

'But the body double should have taken care of their suspicions. It's foolproof! Unless...' Kordelle stood up straighter and began to pace back and forth across the room, subconsciously maneuvering around the stalagtites of books peppering his floor space. 'They could just be suspicious because he hasn't been talking to them. Maybe they just wanted to hang out today after school. It could just be a perfectly innocent thing.