Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom or any related character, all of which are property of Nickelodeon Studios.
The Boy Who Didn't Quite Live…
Danny Fenton's life was never normal, anyone that lived within the city limits could tell you that. Or, more specifically, the Fenton's were not normal. One could immediately spot their home from several blocks away as it was the only one with a giant saucer on top, further more was the large green neon sign hanging on the side of the building that spelled out "Fenton Works" with an adjoining arrow pointed right at the front door.
Of course, this was not the most abnormal feature of the home. The neighbors would often complain of odd noises, similar to the sound of steam shooting out of a kettle, but at ten times the volume and with a healthy does of dying cat. Oh, did I forget to mention the explosions? Yeah I think I did.
This could all be explained by one simple fact: Danny Fenton's parents where ghost hunters. Literally. While both very eccentric, Maddie and Jack Fenton were true geniuses. Together they had created viable energy weapons, personal force fields, and an automatic fudge machine, which was really Jack's own personal endeavor. The man had an unhealthy obsession with fudge. But in his defense, it's fudge!
Then there was his sister, Jasmine. She was, while not as seemingly crazy as her parents, she was equally obsessive. Jazz, as her parents and friends called her, would stay up to the wee hours studying and reading books by psychologists and doctors regarding mental health and psychological disorders. Danny was fairly certain that she suffered from a few, herself.
Danny often struggled for a normal life, or some semblance of it. Danny only had two real friends, Samantha Manson or as she preferred, Sam, and Tucker Foley. Sam was a self describe Goth. She kept her hair short with the exception of a small bob of hair on the top of her head. Heavy combat boots with purple straps were her preferred footwear and a miniskirt and tub top, both of which where of course, black.
Tucker Foley, or just Tuck to his friends i.e. Danny and Sam dressed in "nerd sheikh", orange cargo pants, yellow sweat shirt, and red beanie along with his ever present PDA and numerous other technological gadgets.
The three had been friends for as long as either could remember, each sharing the backgrounds of a not-so-happy-home-life, unpopularity and chronic bullying. Their taste in music varied here and there but each usually enjoyed the taste of the other two. Recreationally speaking, Tucker and Danny were the closest, loving video games, going to the arcade, and racing RC's, while Sam preferred poetry, reading, art, and raging against the machine. Food however was their biggest divide. Sam was an Ultra-recycleo-vegetarian, meaning she took vegetarianism to an extreme, often bringing a layer of TOPSOIL for lunch. Tucker was a pure carnivore, living on a diet that consisted of nearly all meat and bacon grease. Danny was the median between the two, eating both vegetation and meat but preferred a thick steak over a, side salad any day.
Together they struggled through the early years of High School and teen hood. There most common hangouts, were the Nasty Burger, which was actually called the Tasty Burger but one-night vandals took down the T and replaced it with an N making it the Nasty Burger, which really fit the place far better, Echo Park and Danny's parent's basement laboratory which was where they were as this little tale begins.
Perhaps the least bizarre thing about the exceedingly large basement was the copious amount of blue, which was only amplified by the bright white grout between each of the tiles. Long tables were placed along the left and right walls with smaller islands scattered about seemingly at random. On top of table and islands were masses of blueprints, beakers and test tubes filled with bizarre and spectrally colored chemicals, and most of all, what appeared to be weaponry.
The weaponry was in fact, far more than that. Each piece was the culmination of over two decades worth of reasearch and development on the part of Jack and Maddie Fenton. The weapons were created to combat entities from beyond the veil. For those of you that lack a poetic mind, they were built to fight ghosts.
In the center of the back wall was a seven by seven foot hexagonal opening, marked out by heavy steel plates that made up the outside of the, hole. The hole led into a spiraling pathway that grew narrower and narrower until it reached a sharp point thirty feet down. Cables and wiring lined every inch of the hole. Standing before the great hole in the wall was Jack, and Maddie Fenton.
Jack was a man of great height (and girth) dressed in an extremely loud orange jumpsuit. Jack's night black hair was very short, nearly a buzz cut on his flat, tabletop head and graying on the sides.
Maddie, in stark contrast to her husband of nearly twenty-three years, was petite. Dressed in a stylish, powder blue jumpsuit and red goggles, which hid her thick head of reddish-orange, hair and blue eyes.
Both their hearts raced, adrenalin jumped through their veins. Soon, Jack and Maddie's dream would become a reality.
Jack turned to the three teenagers that stood away from the couple, eagerly waiting for the show to start. He cleared his throat loudly and said in his booming, listless voice, "All right kids! You three are about to bare witness to the greatest achievement in human history!" The large, jump suit wearing man knelt down and picked up to long, gray cables. The cable in his left hand trailed back to the hole in the wall, while the cable in his right hand led back to a socket in the wall.
Sam leaned her head toward Danny and muttered out of the corner of her mouth, "Think this is going to work?"
Danny gave a silent shrug. "Either way, it got me out of listening to Jazz."
"Hold up honey!" Maddie cried. She took the cable leading into the wall away from her husband. "Let's do this, together."
Jack smiled wide and gave a massive node. "On the count of three…One…Two…Three!" Jack and Maddie joined the two cables, completing a circuit that sent a massive amount of power straight into the Ghost Portal. The walls crackled and glowed a brilliant emerald.
The stench of ozone filled the air. A mechanical whining echoed in the blue basement. The space within the Portal distorted and shimmered, serpentine shapes slithering and twisting in the mechanical cavern. Finally, it exploded in a wave of shimmering, pulsating emerald light! And that was it. Nothing. Noda. Zilch. Zippo. The emerald light had simply dissipated three seconds after it had appeared.
The three teenagers were quite under whelmed and the two ghost hunters were in shock.
Jack slummed to the floor on his knees. His eyes glazed over and his mouth hanging open like the muscles in his jaw had been ripped out. "B-but it worked…perfectly in…in the simulations…wh-why doesn't it work?" Jack blubbered.
Maddie knelt beside her crushed and broken husband. She put her hands gently on Jack's shoulders and in a voice that only a truly loving wife or mother can have said, "It's alright dear. Sometimes things just need a little tweaking to make it work." Maddie helped Jack to his feet and gently massaged his back. "How about we head upstairs and have some fudge whi-"
That was as far as Maddie got for at the mention of fudge Jack shot throw the heavy metal door, up the stairs and into the kitchen where he was raiding for the delicious chocolaty treat.
The blue haz-mat suited woman gave a loving sigh. She turned to the children as she walked out the basement laboratory. "I'm going to go make sure Jack doesn't choke on the fudge. You kids can stay down here if you want, just be careful."
Maddie hurried up the stairs, the heels of her haz-mat suit clacking against each step, as the sound similar to that of a walrus about to regurgitate a full grown man reached their ears. "JACK! I've told you not to try and eat the whole pan at once!"
"Well, this was a great way to spend a weekend afternoon." Said Tucker with a roll of his eyes. "Not like I had anything better to do."
Danny looked at his best friend with a dull stare. "You didn't."
"True, but I still could have went to the mall and get a date!" replied Tucker as he looked over mechanical looking thermos in his hands.
"That would be a sign of the Apocalypse Tuck." Sam said. The Goth girl was seemingly entranced by the failed experiment that was the Ghost Portal. Her nose twitched from the lingering stench of Ozone and of something else that she just couldn't put her finger on. She chewed on her bottom lip as her mind raced. With quick, rapid steps, Sam stood before the doorway to a theoretical plain of existence. She traced her hand of the metal rim, feeling the still warm surface. Sam suddenly spun around to face Danny and Tucker, both of whom were looking at her with mildly curious eyes.
"Why don't you go in there and check it out Danny?"
Danny was taken back by Sam's sudden, odd, question. "Why?"
"Don't you want to help your mom and dad out? You saw how disappointed they were when this thing didn't work." Reasoned Sam who had stepped away from the Portal. "Think about it, if you were able to find out what caused it not work, you'd be the one getting praise instead of Jazz!"
That got Danny's attention. Like a cheetah, Danny was over to the lockers that had been pushed into the right corner. Grabbing the latch with two of his fingers, Danny opened the locker which was filled with a number of haz-mat suits, most of which were screaming orange and fitted for Jack.
He dug through the hanging suits until, with a cry of "ah-ha", he withdrew a suit that was just the right size for him. The haz-mat suit was white for the most part, almost painfully so. The boots, really just thicker section made from a polymer that his parents had invented, and gloves were deep black. Along with the large, circular collar, it was the only break in the blinding field of white.
Danny pulled down the zipper in the back, all the way down to the suits butt section, and walked over to a stool and sat down. Not bothering to take off his shoes, or any of his clothes for rather understandable reasons, Danny slid his right foot into the suit and down its leg with only minimal struggle. Danny wasn't worried about tearing the suit; it was made from an incredible resilient fabric that could take a good quality, hunting knife to tear through.
Putting his other leg in, Danny stood up and pulled the sides of the open suit and put his left arm into the sleeve, followed by his right arm. Turning his back to his friends, he looked over his shoulder at the pair.
"Zip me up?"
Tucker was the one to comply. He grabbed the small, metal tag and pulled up, closing the suit up and readying it for a short exploratory mission into the strange, technological failure.
"Looking good man." Tucker said, stifling a laugh in the palm of his hand.
Danny furrowed his brow at his long time friend. "What? What's so funny?"
Sam gave him the answer by grabbing his chest and pealing off a sticker of his father's smile visage. "I think this might be it." She said with a snide grin. She balled the rather abominable decoration up and tossed it into a small wastebasket.
"Ten points!" Tucker exclaimed, still laughing.
Danny massaged his temples in a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation. "Dear God, I can't believe he stuck that thing on my suit!" Danny moved over to the gaping hole in the wall, which suddenly seemed three hundred times bigger. He managed a nervous smile. "I've always wondered what kind of super cool things could be on the other side of this thing. Wish me luck guys."
With that, Danny ventured into the inactive Portal, his path barely illuminated by the lights from his parent's lab behind him. He gulped down a breath of air as a sense of dread began to well within his stomach as he went deeper into the Portal.
Maybe it was the feeling of fear, or simply he was trying to maintain his balance in the passage as it grew narrower, but Danny did something that would cause shockwaves through his, and many others lives, for long time to come. With he left hand, Danny groped along the side of the wall, as he tried to find a fraid wire or a broken connection. What did find was his hand sank a little farther than he thought it would. Before he could look to see what had caused this, there was a great big flash. Danny had found the 'on' button.
Danny's vision was washed in a field of varying shades green. His body was on fire with pain and agony, as if each of his atom's was being ripped away. He choked out a silent scream that would shatter the strongest man's soul into a thousand pieces. Danny felt his form being pulled and twisted this way and that by forces far beyond mortal understanding. Daniel felt as if is very soul, his essence, was being ripped in two.
Suddenly, images, foggy and distorted, that touched his barest of peripheral vision. Forms that were alien to him, yet at same time inspired a sense of déjà vu. He heard the voices, softly at first, but grew louder and louder, becoming like a rapid drumming in his head, only catching the quickest "notes".
Dude you've got… The greatest hunter…DIPSTICK!
Denounce your…
Dear Ma…
I shall this little electronic…
Demon Brothers are…
BEWARE!
Leave it to the professionals kid…
So much stronger…
We're the X-Men…
The Amazing…
You're a dork…
Lord Ghoul…
You could get…
Funny, I've never called myself that…
All I have ever…
Drag you down!
"GAAAHHH!"
Danny shot up, drenched in sweet, his heart feeling like it was ready to explode.
"Oh thank goodness Danny!"
The youngest Fenton was left gasping for breath as his mother grabbed him in a sudden, and crushing squeeze. He looked about and found himself in his room surrounded by his family, all of who looked crazed with joy.
"Gave us a bit of a scare, there son!" Jack said, leaning on the edge of his bed.
"I'm amazed you survived." Jazz spoke up, pushing her long red hair out of her eyes. "We heard that thing explode all the way up her!"
"Explode? What? What happened?" Danny begged, confused beyond belief.
"The Ghost Portal." Maddie explained. "You went inside it and turned it on. You were caught in event horizon when the Portal became active."
"So maybe a 'on/off' button in the inside of you're insane little 'Ghost Portal' was a bad idea in retrospect?" the ever cocky Jazz lectured.
"Well, it wasn't my worst idea!" Jack said in his defense. "Remember the Fenton Soft Serve Cannon?"
"Didn't that thing put a cup of ice cream through the wall?" said Danny.
"Yes! But it make very good soft serve."
Maddie cleared her throat, getting everyone's attention. She looked at Danny with a piercing gaze. "What I want to now is why you went into the Ghost Portal in the first place?"
Danny's mind froze faster than an early 1980's PC. He grabbed at the sheets of his bed, nervously balling them up in his hands. "W-what about Tucker and Sam? Where are they?"
"We told them to go home after we made sure you weren't dead." Jack said flatly. "We thought it best."
"Oh…well, I just…they way you guys acted after it didn't work, I…kinda wanted to see if I could fix it." Danny said, giving out a small half-truth.
"That was stupid and reckless of you!" Maddie shouted. "You could have very well been killed. You shouldn't handle things you don't understand. I'm going to go down to the lab and check out your test results."
"Test results?"
"We took a blood sample to see if the accident had any adverse reactions to your body." Maddie explained. She got up out of Danny's computer chair, nearly bumping her head on a hanging model rocket, and left the room.
Danny looked down, a feeling of shame and embarrassment weighing heavy on his heart. That's when he noticed something odd. "Um, Dad? Where's my haz-mat suit?"
"Oh, we think it might have been atomized when the Ghost Portal activated."
"Which just goes to show you that you should not be experimenting with stuff like this!" Jazz proclaimed, shaking her head as she headed for Danny's door. She looked over her shoulder and smiled. "Glad your okay little bro."
Jack looked at Danny with an uncertain look in his eyes. "Look Danny, don't tell your mother I said this but…I think that was pretty cool of you. See you later son."
With that, Jack hurried from Danny's room, leaving the teenager all alone, and very, very confused.
"Well, it appears that you are in perfect health aside from a slightly elevated leave of electrolytes." Maddie said, holding a sheet of printer paper in her hand.
"Sooo, I can still go to school?" Danny asked, putting his Ultraman comic book down on his nightstand.
"Yep, sorry about that." Jack said, genuinely sorry for his son, then sorry for himself after Maddie elbowed him in his gut.
Danny shrugged, only upset that he would probably have to put up with Dash and his cronies on Monday. A wave of dizziness quickly washed over Danny like a flash of lightening. "Hey, guys, I'd like to try a get some sleep. I'm feeling pretty tired."
"Alright dear, sleep tight." Maddie said before kissing Danny on his forehead, much to his displeasure.
"Night son." Jack smiled and walked out of the room after Maddie, closing the door behind him.
Danny got up out of his bed and shed himself of his clothes, dropping them on the floor unceremoniously, before wiping his forehead, feeling sweat dampen his skin. He walked to his wall, flipped the light switch off and jumped back into bed, curling up in his blankets, feeling unusually cold.
Well here it is people! My promised Danny Phantom fanfic! I can't promise that the updates will be rapid fire, nor can I grantee that you will like the alterations to the Danny Phantom mythos I'm going to make, but I promise I'll try and stay as true as I can to the characters.
If you liked this, please drop a review and check out some of my other stuff on my profile page.