Welcome, welcome, to a new collection of oneshots, short stories, drabbles, and try-outs for longer fics. If you're just tuning in, go check out 'Star Shots', the first collection of 100 stories.

This is number two. We'll see how far it gets. Hold on to your turbans, amigos, 'cause we're going supernova!

(Oh, and btw, I originally picked 'nova' because it means 'new' in Latin, not because of the obvious and belated-noticed connection to the first drabble set.)

This is a hand-off from Nylah, supreme authoress of all things cloning and melting.

Melting
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

The first thing I heard when I woke up was the sound of ectoplasm-based technology. It's got this unmistakable whining sound that sends shivers up your back and makes all your hair stand on end. Once you hear it, you never forget it and you never mistake it for anything else. Hearing that particular sound, of course, I knew meant one of three things.

One: I was in a nightmare of ghostly proportions and a demented version of Bozo the Clown was going to be staring at me when I opened my eyes, some sort of painful ectoplasm-based technology hanging over my head, laughing at me while he painfully cut me to pieces.

Two: the semi-governmental idiots that ran the ludicrous agency known as the Guys in White had finally captured me and were about to dissect me, despite all of the odds showing that they would never ever manage to get their hands on me.

Or three: I was in my parents' lab.

Fortunately for me, my nose decided to wake up, start working, and dispel two of the more ridiculous options. The acrid smell of ectoplasm was tinged with fudge: I was in the lab.

The question became why. Why was I waking up in my parents' basement laboratory? I searched through my memories, throwing them left and right while I looked for an actual reason, keeping my eyes closed. I remembered coming home from school on Friday, annoyed that Sam and Tucker had managed to get sick and leave me to suffer through the longest day of school ever all on my own. I remembered eating supper – actually, I remember hunting down supper after it came to life and jumped off the table, I don't believe I technically ate supper. I even remembered going to bed.

Which made today Saturday, most likely. After a moment of contemplation, I remembered eating breakfast this morning and not feeling good. I must have caught whatever Sam and Tucker had. But that was the last thing I could access. Waking up sick… and waking up in the lab. Nadda in between.

Finally I opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling, folding my arms behind my head and sighing. The fact that I had an apparent hole in my memories was frustrating, but…

Catching a strange sparkle out of the corner of my eye, I turned my head and focused on the air just beyond the edge of the cot, cutting off my thoughts mid-sentence. There it was again – a shimmer in the air, a flicker of an unnatural green. Slowly I glanced all around me, then back over my head. The strange disturbance formed a dome about seven feet across all around me.

Oh hell, I was inside a ghost shield.

I let my head fall back against my arms and groaned, sorting through the various possibilities of why I was in such a place. It was possible that my parents thought I'd be attacked by a ghost while I was down here so they set up a ghost shield to protect me. That theory didn't hold water too well, since they'd have just put me up in my bedroom instead of down here if that were the case. There was also the slight possibility that my parents had wanted to keep an eye on me – maybe my fever had gotten really bad – and they were just being their normal overprotective selves. Unfortunately, I didn't think much of that idea either.

The most likely reason I was inside a ghost shield was because I was, in fact, a ghost and my parents, being ghost hunters, were more than a little up on the idea of dangerous ghosts being separated from humanity in general. That was one of the reasons I'd never told them the truth about my accident when I was fourteen. The idea that ghosts could be anything but evil usually gave them a migraine.

I'd been buttering them up now for a bit over a year, slowly tickling them with the idea that ghosts – namely me – were good things that didn't need to be hunted and dissected without mercy. Every chance both my sister and I got, we pointed out the evidence that there were good ghosts as well as evil ones. So far, not so good. At last check they were still gunning for my pelt in a way that even Skulker stopped to admire every now and then.

So you can see how waking up inside a ghost shield didn't do much to inspire confidence in me. The fact that my parents were separating me from them through the use of a high-energy, next-generation piece of technology was a bit off-putting. Of course, since I was as human as I was ghost, I could walk straight through it with little more than a zap and having to suffer with being statically charged for an hour, but that wasn't the point.

The point was that my parents had attempted to lock me in their mad scientist lab. I ground my teeth together, wondering what was going to happen next. Would they try to experiment on me? Would they be accepting of my strange not-so-human state? Or, at worse, would they keep me down here and ask me all sorts of questions? I knew my dad had a constantly evolving list of all the things he wanted to ask a ghost if he ever managed to catch one that could talk. I could be stuck down here for days.

But none of that answered the original question of why I was down here in the first place. If my parents knew about me… how did they find out? They were more than a little oblivious – over a year of quietly dropped hints hadn't managed to bring out even the faintest sparkle of comprehension. What happened? What wasn't my mind throwing at me to remember?

Ka-click.

Someone – probably my mother, due to the lack of the stairs creaking because of my father's weight – closed the door at the top of the basement stairs and headed down into the lab. I felt a moment of panic, wondering if I should say something. Just before she came into view, I closed my eyes and relaxed my body, pretending to still be asleep, my heart beating loudly in my chest.

"Danny?" she whispered, not turning on the light.

I took that as a good sign – if she cared enough to not disturb my 'sleep' then she probably wasn't up to dissection – but I didn't respond. I wondered how much information I could get out of her before she found out I was awake. Maybe she'd clue me in on why I was down in the lab, behind the ghost shield, with a giant hole in my head where the past few hours should have fit.

Unfortunately for me, she kept quiet as she bustled around the shadowed room. I could hear pieces of technology moving around, soft clatters of sound as she picked up things and set them down. Then there was a soft light, a quiet whir, then everything fell silent again.

"Still asleep, huh Sweetie?" she said softly and I felt her warm hand touch my forehead to bush some of my hair back. With a year of practice, I carefully kept myself from moving. "Your fever's gone down… you really scared us for a while. I was twenty minutes from bringing you to the hospital when your fever finally broke."

That didn't sound very good. My fever had been that bad?

Her hand left my head and rearranged my blanket. "If you decide to wake up," she continued, still speaking in a whisper, "stay here, okay Honey? We're flooding the area inside the shield with spectral energy to help keep you stabilized." She leaned over me and pressed a soft kiss to my forehead. "I brought you some crackers and water if you're up to it too."

I didn't move a muscle, although my mind was working furiously. I heard Mom walk away and the soft ka-click of the door closing behind her, but still I didn't move. First of all there was the quite obvious fact that my 'sleeping' hadn't fooled my mom one bit. She knew I was awake and faking it – which begged the question of how often I really did fool her. That wasn't a question that really needed answering at the moment though; it was one to be filed away to contemplate at a later time.

The big problem was that whole issue of 'stabilized'. What in the world did she mean by that? They're flooding the area with spectral energy? What does that mean? What was wrong with me? What wasn't I remembering?

Suddenly I wished I had opened my eyes and could ask some questions – not knowing what was going on had to be worse than dealing with the fact that my parents knew I was a ghost. I opened my eyes and looked around the shadowed lab, trying to look past the shimmering ghost shield. Small lights flickered and flashed all over the lab like a late-night Mardi Gras parade. I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking for and, after a moment, disappointment curled inside of me at not finding anything helpful.

"Excellent," I rasped. Turning my head the other way, I caught sight of the plate of crackers and the glass of water Mom had mentioned. Levering myself to my elbows, I reached out and grabbed the glass, sipping at the cool water. What was I going to do next?

Snagging one of the saltine crackers, I chewed on it slowly as I pushed myself up so I was sitting and staring around the room. I was kind of at a loss. Mom had told me to stay put but…

I swung my legs a few times, then slowly eased myself off the edge of the cot. I didn't feel bad, I felt good, really. My feet connected with the ground. But when I put weight on my legs, they collapsed under me like spaghetti noodles. My arms couldn't hold me upright and I dropped to the ground with a groan, the plate of crackers clattering down beside me.

"Ow…" I muttered, shaking my head and using my shaking arms to push me back to sitting. Why was I so weak? What had happened to me?

I shook my head dazedly, reaching out to pick up the plate and the crackers I'd dropped. I hesitated when I noticed that the crackers had fallen outside the ghost shield, but I just took a breath and stuck my hand through the ghost shield to collect them.

Two things happened in that instant.

The first was that I got zapped – and I got zapped good. I could feel the discharge of electricity in my teeth.

The second was that my hand started to look really weird. I yanked my hand back through the ghost shield and stared at the greenish liquid that had appeared all over my hand.

I sat down in the chair at my desk, my head throbbing in time with my heartbeat. The world was spinning, but I really didn't seem to care much. I didn't feel good. Especially after breakfast – Dad's cereal wasn't sitting well in my stomach. Maybe I should have just gone back to bed, it was Saturday after all.

Minutes passed as I stared down at my hands. I couldn't get up the desire to do homework and my mind wasn't really processing doing anything other than sit. My hands were what was fascinating me, 'caught' in my head. The bumps, and the creases, and the patches of color and the fingernails and that one spot on my finger…

What was going with my finger? I held up my hand, looking at it closer. My hand looked wet. A glob of greenish, glistening liquid rolled down my fingers, crossed the palm of my hand, and dripped onto my desk. The spot on my desk started to sizzle as the intense energy of the liquid burned into the desk's wood. Another drip. I just watched.

My hands… my skin… was crying…

I blinked away the memory, startled. My hand was drying – either absorbing the strange liquid or letting it evaporate away. I searched my mind, wanting more of that. What happened after that?

"Mom?" I asked softly, my whole body swaying as I stumbled down the steps into the lab.

She turned around, her soft smile vanishing as she took in my ragged appearance. "What's wrong?"

In response I held out my hand. Liquid was still forming on my skin, but by now it wasn't just a few drops dripping onto the floor. It was more like a faucet. I'd left a streak of burning carpet and flooring in my wake on the way down here.

Mom was over to me in a flash, worry in her eyes as she saw what was on me. "Ectoplasm?" she asked, reached forwards. Her ungloved hands touched my skin before quickly drawing away, her human skin unable to take the combination of energy and cold that the ectoplasm released. "It is… but…" She looked up at me, confused. "Why isn't it burning you?"

I blinked at her a few times, not comprehending the question. "I don't feel good, Mom," I whispered.

Her face dissolved into motherly concern as she reached forwards to touch my forehead. I felt her fingers for only a moment before she jerked her hand away, her fingers burned. The strange liquid, the ectoplasm, was leaking out of the skin on my forehead. I could feel it start to soak into my clothes and puddle on the ground around me.

"Mom…"

I stared down at my now-completely-dry hand in horror, the memory fading away. My hand was shaking. Actually, my whole body was trembling. I had figured out what was going on, and I was scared.

I was melting.

Uploaded August 29, 2008
:D See you soon! I have a lot of these saved up...
Thank you for reading!