I do not own the KP characters, they and all related matter are the property of Disny. The Danny Phantom characters and events are the property of Nikelodeon.
The characters of Saint, Immortal and all the other Paragons are the property of THom Clegg and may not be used without express written permission.
Where the hell is it
Where the hell is it? This thing is so much smarter than a demonite, it's surreal.
I slip through another wall and feel that odd resistance that's been plaguing me through this whole thing. It's like a tingly feeling that passes through my insubstantial body as I make passage. Shaking me head to clear it, I look up along yet another curving corridor. This place is like a cross between a maze and a labyrinth; there is the curving repetitive nature of a labyrinth so that it's confusing enough to let you get muddles about directions and to add to that there are actual dead ends here but those are all just false corridors.
Making life more difficult, whatever mad genius designed this place has the whole thing sewn through complex optical illusions and corridors that actually shrink into nothing.
I can't quite work out why I'm doing this hunt. Immortal would have been better suited to it but he's busy and claims that Saint really isn't ready to take on anything of this power level.
Whatever it is has apparently beaten a whole Vatican containment team on its own. I…
Thought process interrupted by movement. My eyes roll around unbidden and my feet got through years of hard lessons, instantly bringing me into a course to intercept it.
You don't live through as much as I have without getting used to confronting everything you encounter and figuring out how to defeat it. Where the hell did it go?
I reach the point where I saw the movement, a broad curve to the right; the corridor carries on to a set of turns further on, one towards the outer circles and one towards the inner circles.
"Where are you, you little devil?" I growl out of a tattered and torn throat. The dust here has a grating, unearthly quality that's getting through my membranes. It's actually rather troubling now that I think about it; even my internal linings are stronger by weight than steel. If this stuff is grating on it then it's either harder, which is unlikely, or has some form of magical quality that negates my perfections.
The entity I'm hunting at the moment is a demon that Immortal kept calling Grimm. Childhood fears or somesuch, which I can truly imagine but in this day and age, I can't imagine it being all too powerful given the mood control technologies.
A shadow shifts to my left and I execute a roll-back move from my repertoire of T'ai Chi moves, sinking into a cat stance, ready to receive any attack that might be coming. Wait, a shadow?
I glance downwards and realise that for the first time in this creepy place that I have a shadow. Light bleeds out of the walls here, I shouldn't have a shadow unless…
Congealing from the stuff of the shadow itself, a hand grips my ankle and slams me bodily into the wall as if I were little more than a flag on a stick of bamboo.
Once, twice, three times I'm struck against the walls. I don't even have time to be surprised; the ability this force is using to drive my weight around without having any leverage is almost unimaginable. It's like I'm utterly weightless rather than more than three hundred pounds of mythically dense muscle.
The grip slackens and I'm sent bouncing down the corridor. I catch a slight glimpse of the damn thing erupting from the patch of blackness, dragging it with its body like a cloth draped over a hole. For a moment, an inky black entity like a person hangs in front of me, regarding me with eyes of iridescent green that seems to be backlit by inner fire.
For that brief moment, I question whether this entity could be the spirit of my lost love.
Six years may have passed since she died and I may have been through a torture designed entirely to eradicate any fondness I may have once held for her but you can't resist a soul-bond.
"Kim?" I ask with a horrible edge of desperate hope in my voice. I wish there wasn't that part of me floating in there sometimes.
The ghostly head tilts slightly, regarding me for a second before disappearing around the corner with a fluid grace comparable to that of a dash of ink in flowing water.
Sweet feminine laughter filters back around the corner to my ears. Suddenly, I can't breath, tears fighting to break out of my eyes while everything else in my essence fights to keep them down for the duration of the job. There is comfort to be had in the arms of many at home but here I am alone save for myself.
I take flight to match the speed of the spirit, hurling myself around the corner.
I have to know, slim chance it may be but Saint was specific that she couldn't bring her back because no-one knew what had become of her spirit.
A twist and a turn and I've lost all trace of the spectre, much to my disappointment. I guess I have on other option but to press onwards towards the centre of the rings, assuming that the centre is actually located at the core.
Sounds stupid but with the way the geometry has been screwed up so far, I wouldn't put it past it.
Deeper I push and still no trace of the damn demon I was hunting, assuming that this Kim-spectre isn't the thing in disguise.
"Where are you, Grimm?" I breath quietly, my patience tattered like my throat. Part of me wants to split up and search the whole place faster but another part is urging caution. Grimm is of the third order and that makes him dangerous and the more I'm aware of that, the worse he can get.
"Who's Grimm, Ghost?" a voice asks from all around me. There is no shadow here and none of my senses are being excited by anything so I have no idea where the thing is.
"Ghost?" I ask, not really knowing what the androgynous voice is insinuating but not really caring. I'm just hoping that I can keep it talking to work out where the voice actually is.
"You intend to claim that you're not a ghost?" there's laughter in that voice but it isn't friendly, far from it; chilling.
"Ghost? Define."
"A free floating ectoplasmic entity with an objective intelligence of at least three."
Cold, clinical, precise. That's the thought process of a hunter if ever I heard one.
"Specific definition there. I'm not a ghost then, unless you want to accuse me of being hungry; I'll admit that I could go for a naco."
"You're mocking me?" the voice demands, suddenly urgent and almost petulant in tone.
"Better to laugh than cry, I always say!" I respond with as much cheer as I can master. Please essential Ron-ness, don't desert me now.
"Laugh?! I'll give you laughter! The laughter of those who will celebrate when you fail, who will point and gain glee from your crushing defeat, Ghost! You'll never make it back to the other side!"
The light that the walls were emitting begins to dampen in my area while it grows more intense further away. Whatever this entity is, it has the ability to spread itself so thin that it can allow light to pass through it without noticeably affecting the ambient levels. It takes me a whole second to get my head around the fact that I know what ambient means.
By this point, the darkness around me has become so intense that it's akin to ordinary shadow now and darkening with each passing instant.
It can't hurt you if you don't fear it. You can respond faster than it can attack and you can shield against anything that you can't dodge. There's nothing to fear, Ron
The darkness pulls away from the surfaces of the corridor, casting together in the centre like some great orifice of darkness. A jet black wall hangs over the passageway for a second or two before two great, blazing green eyes open in its very fabric. I try to meet the gaze but I've never seen such accusation and righteous fury outside of a mirror before.
"Whoa," I manage before a mouth turned with anger and guilt parts from the blackness.
What follows is unlike any attack I have ever felt before. The very air feels like it's made of sorrow and tears, washing against me in irresistible waves. Mental barriers and years of discipline crumble in seconds as if cut down by those within.
The pounding beat of the drum, the thick, humid air, the stillness as my rocket skates carried me across the tarmac. I'll never forget those meagre moments that trailed away as I tried desperately to catch up with the ninjas.
The stillness is there again as she tries to fire that damn grappler once more, only to find that it's out of cartridges. She falls so slowly, like the beautiful snowflake that she is, a high scream, calling my name being the only thing I can hear.
Ron!
The air is thick with streamers and I look up from my place atop Kim's soft chest as a heavy shadow descents on the area we occupy.
"I am your doom," it howls as nearly five hundred pounds of ninja descends on us through the pounding soup of drumbeats and techno-music.
Kim pushes me off her and I roll, trying desperately to cycle through a whole spread of powers. None of them are there! Kim is far enough out of the way that the mysterious combination of luck and perfect agility kicks in and the sumo's weight turns the baseplate of the float into a seesaw, catapulting her into the air.
She lands neatly on top of it and tells him about her success at the regionals.
I take the opportunity to pull his underwear almost three feet away from his body. The feeling of Déjà vu is almost palpable as I do this given that I have no idea why I'm doing it. Then again, the squeal is rather rewarding.
The squeal of turbojet engines heralds the arrival of Shego as she bombs down the street in that gaudy aircraft of hers. Kim seems genuinely surprised as the grappler thing fires out of the ventral mount of the aircraft and catches hold of Nakasumi. For a moment, I'm forced to reflect on the stupidity of trying to fight these monsters rather than making sure that we got Nakasumi out of harm's way. We really are naïve.
No, wiat, that's wrong. There is no we, Kim's going to…
Kim activates those damn rocket skate things and charges after Shego, catching onto the toy magnate.
This is where it all goes sour isn't it?
I grab the wrist of my glove and activate my own skates, hammering after her. As always, I fail to get hold of Kim's ankle and sail gracefully through the front window of the largest department store in Japan, leading to legal suits for the rest of my unoppressed days. All forty of them.
As I dig myself out, Kim busies herself talking to Monique and really not taking the threat posed by the situation seriously, bouncing off walls and floors with her usual agility and using those skates to avoid having to deal with momentum overmuch.
There she goes around that U-bend and now…she comes hurtling around dragged by the jet's momentum and my queue to intervene.
The three ninja jump up and I hurl myself skyward, trying to intercept them as I must and as always, I manage to catch only two of them, sending them toppling from their leaps. The third continues upward and manages to land a vicious strike on Kim's midsection as she passes.
Her scream is as wrenching as any sound I've ever heard and tiny droplets of her blood cascade downwards onto my prone form. Once again, she takes to the air, with Shego making a near vertical climb up the face of a building. Desperate to try to save her, I reach for the other glove, activating the one device I never understood why Wade built; blaster briefs.
Why I even put them on is anyone's guess…
Flying through the air on a wedgie like no other, I follow them as Shego switches into a stall turn and then begins an Immelmann turn, plummeting ground-ward. Kim's grimace of pain shows clearly, as does her soft whimper of suffering, cutting me like a knife. She looses her grip at the same moment that I manage to land on that roof. That accursed roof.
I run, pain welling through my body and a real feeling of failure cutting through what determination I can muster before I've even tried. Slamming into the barrier, I throw an arm out, hand offered and Kim takes it in her fear. The contact isn't enough; not nearly enough.
Those nimble, steely fingers brush over my fingertips. Once again, I have failed her.
She looks up to me, grabbing her grappler and firing it skywards. The lack of spool means that I'm nearly missed by the spars of the propellant shell fired from the barrel. Her beautiful eyes fill with fear for the briefest of seconds and I cry out.
"KIM!"
Sadness fills those green eyes and then there's the discolouration for a second and she's gone. In films there's always either a great deal of blood or none at all. Here, it's something else and as I descend on my grappler cord, she bleeds slowly, almost peacefully from her major orifices and the wound in her belly.
Crouching there, tears coming slowly, almost outside myself, I notice that the crowd has formed but daren't come closer than about thirty feet as I stroke her hair, whimpering in denial; tears mingling with her blood.
A voice like mine but at once something else entirely cuts through my grief.
"Enough. This is enough."
"How could this be enough?" I demand with the vanity of the hurt, "how could any amount of tears be enough to quiet this pain?"
"Until you say it is, there is no such thing as enough. Be still and think. We've been here before."
I pause, wondering what this voice may be and the world comes flooding back in horrible Technicolor.
I'm pressed into an imprint in a smooth white wall that has a slight curvature. I'm alone and where the hell that voice was coming from is anyone's guess. It didn't sound like the Narrator…
"That was less than pleasant," I mutter, wishing that I had Rufus here to do his little 'Uhuh-uhuh' thing.
I begin hammering through the twists and turns of the labyrinth at the highest speed I can muster, splitting off duplicates and spreading out through the maze.
What troubles me is that there isn't a centre to this place. I don't get it.
Who would build a labyrinth without a central chamber?
I wonder if any of the others have found something that could shed a little more light on the situation?
Where is that demon? I'm going to rip it a new one. Or at least rip it some more I suppose…never did understand where its orifices are…
Hurting demons is complicated at times. They aren't afraid of much and they have no sense of violation so it's difficult to torture them.
Around the corner comes a dark shape with piercing green eyes.
"Torture me with my memories will you?" I ask with a smile that would make the sane cringe.
"You're not getting out of here, ghost!" it howls at me as it hammers towards me with an impossible speed.
"Ghost?" I manage before it slips into my chest and the world goes funny.
I feel a slight twinge in the edges of my consciousness, one of the duplicates just had a change of circumstance. That's never good.
Something about it is slightly disturbing and takes my breath away for a second. I lean slowly against the outer curve of the last ring, trying to find my balance. That was surprisingly unsettling.
There's a seam here. I can't slip through solid matter but I can slip through any crack. Entry is surprisingly easy when you can control you body perfectly.
"I can't allow you to do that Ronald," my voice says from behind with a coldness that could only come from one place.
Looking around, I stand staring at me, looking predatory as a human can. There's something in those eyes that says that I'm going to regret being here.
"Passion?" I wonder in that brief moment.
"How are you mimicking my powers, mortal?" Passion demands with barely controlled rage echoing through his tone.
"Your powers?" I ask as his first blow connects with me.
I hammer back into the wall, bending the metal and its smooth white surface. I guess I have the advantage in that even if I destroy Passion's body the worst that will happen is that I regain a hair, but I have a suspicion that whoever is running the thing is about to discover what happens when you share a head with the worst of someone.
As if to prove to me that there is something inhabiting the body, a beam of brilliant green energy leaps from an outstretched hand, striking me in the chest and chilling me to the bone. Not a common demonic signature but one I've been briefed about.
If he's in my head, then I'm in his head. This is such a good opportunity to drive him out and be done with it while he doesn't realise what's going on…
Nah, never be normal!
Lets see what makes him tick…and see if we can't find a pair of metaphysical shins to kick him in.
My attacker tilts his head to the left, pulling it down as if in pain; "What…no, you can't!"
The head whips up until it's facing slightly to the left and then in a calm and sickening voice I know all too well speaks out against the first voice, not a hint of strain anywhere within it.
"You overshadow me, I go through the toy box. Should have thought of this before."
Taking my chance, I soften my form and slip through the seam in the wall. As I sprawl backwards, I kick into a little roll and into a backlit room with a faint greenish glow. The walls are the same stark white but somehow less alien, as if they were not lit correctly. I shake my head to clear it a little; the difference in here is that the surfaces are not weirdly backlit as they were in the rest of the complex.
No, here the walls are lit from the faint glow of a collection of bubbling tubes. Drakken technology. Those weird cold fusion machines if I'm not mistaken. With these non-volatile energy sources, I'm deeply confused about the constant explosions I managed to cause over the years but still. At the far side of the room, a doorway of sorts stands alone in the middle of the room, a tube with a great hatch mounted on the near side.
Light bleeds from the cracks in a slow, almost lazy fashion, though that becomes apparent that some form of shimmering motion is occurring beyond the barrier, like sunlight on water. I stop closer, one small pace at a time and I can hear something akin to constant dilute screaming in the edges of my mind.
Loss
Longing
Fear
These things bleed together into a greater cacophony with each passing moment. The pressure is unbelievable as I get close, the sorrow overwhelming.
Yet through all of that, the pain and the suffering, I can sense something else; movement.
Near to the gateway, slaved to the same power source, stands another, larger tube. The movement is what shocks me, with both its content and the feeling of having been in this moment before. The slow drift of a piece of muslin fabric is what catches my eye, a halo drifting in the aeration system's currents around a young woman with pale skin and dark hair.
"I am Undergrowth!" screams the very insistent foliage that looms over us. I'm stood next to a lean boy of about fourteen, though I was built like a fortress compared to him at that age. I'm back wearing unflattering mission garb and my old cowlick haircut and that stands in a weird contrast to his black bodysuit with white gloves, boots and hair.
A gigantic tendril of…something, slams down into the area he had just occupied and laboriously drags itself off to strike at him once more. The beast seems to be ignoring me completely.
Oh yeah, first rule of shared experience. What was it Immortal said to the main me when he was learning about this? Why wasn't I there? Oh yeah, Saint.
Erm…wait, first rule is that it's never truly shared, one of you is always dominant; usually the dreamer.
The kid begins to confront the giant vines with some kind of blue ray that coats everything in hoar frost and makes them brittle. A rain of frozen and broken vine begins to plummet to earth as they do battle longer and longer. Dream physics are simplistic because only the experiences that are forced by the mind exist within them, at least when they're more like visions. If I were to try running in most of the directions here, I'd end up returning to where I am now. Each aspect of a dream is a sphere of experience linked to the others by a thin boundary.
I follow the hints of doom that hang heavy in the air. In places, the whole world is like one big sigh. It's rattling and more than a little difficult to concentrate in this momentary emo paradise. Coasting along above the vine choked cityscape below, I can't help but wonder why we never heard about this…a section of city, in fact, apparently a large section of the east coast, gets consumed by virulent foliage and it wasn't in the news? Then again, neither was the incident concerning mind reduction hats in Dakota.
Forging onwards, I realise that the plants aren't all plants…some of the mass is living tissue, human, animal. I mentally attack the dreamstuff, questing for the hidden understanding of the dreamer beneath. A blank, staring face looks up to greet me, the wind breathing a silent, 'mother' as I move on. These are the people he knew and loved, bound by the plants and apparently being fed upon. I can feel…for want of a better word, essence being drawn from them. A horror to be sure.
I almost feel sorry for him.
The sorrow lays heaviest in this direction and as I follow it, I keep feeling the heady tang of regret and remorse.
"You're not Danny!" calls out an angry and not unattractive female voice, though the tides of time have yet to polish it to a jewel. I turn and find the owner glaring at me through a pair of unnaturally coloured eyes, her pretty, sculpted face looking slightly sallow beneath a crested head of twig-filled black hair. The aura of sadness attached to her thin, partially exposed figure makes me painfully aware that she is the object of this whole scenario.
"No, I'm not," I reply, grinning because I'm planning on enjoying this, "he's trying to save you from yourself, while I, on the other hand, am trying to ensure that he hates this scenario more than ever before."
"You what?" she manages before the first of the punches I've got aimed at her face makes contact, shattering teeth with a sound like wood shattering under strain. Her howl of fury is cut off by the arrival of 'Danny.'
I catch his momentum in one hand and redirect it into her with the other, his attempt to knock me away from her coming to nothing; less than nothing.
I briefly savour the pain as the Lotus begins to pour forth from the tiny scar sphincters in my skin, an uncomfortable itch as I parry and dodge blow after blow, each one with enough power to put a Diablo robot to shame. Three way fights are always unproductive so I step back to allow the plant-girl to strike out at the ghost. A tendril catches him in the midsection, though he grips hold of it and avoids being thrown, a professional move as far as they go, though where he got experience against such strength is beyond me.
I laugh at the horror and pain on her face as his hands leave frozen handprints on the surface of the vine, clear ice that thaws rapidly in the humid heat of the day, leaving behind browning wreckage. He turns, anger flashing in his eyes to confront me but he doesn't get the chance as a tetsubo like trunk, studded with razor like leaves hammers into him, driving him to the ground. The scream of rage lasted the entire distance ground-wards and ended with a bone jarring crunch.
"Tell me, why it he trying to save you from the crazy plant man and his garden of doom?" I ask, glib as I like.
"He's under the mistaken impression that his fondness for me and the flesh love I once felt for him is enough to make me wish to surrender the succour of the Growth. He will lose anyway. He cannot defeat Father."
"Given that you're obviously Jewish, would I be right that Undergrowth is a Gherkin trying to make a name for himself?"
Her unintelligible hatred beats down at me as I begin to shuck the limits of physics placed upon me by his recollections. I slip through layer and layer of her defences, passing through the eyes of needles that look like football fields to my trained eye. Her last ditch after all the complex swipes and layered blocks is a single heavy tentacle that thrusts towards me, barbs bared. I shift myself to the side in the air, passing along the thing so that it's barbs scrape along my back and then, calling the Lotus from it's cloud around me, slash upwards behind my back, severing the growth and coating myself in sap that is very close to the colour of blood.
The cried of hatred become overlaid ones of pain as the plants and all those trapped creatures nearby add their voices to the cacophony. The demon child seemed to be missing from this incident for moments before a violent explosion cuts through her screams and the sound turns to focus on another direction. A vast ice lined crater has formed not too far from here and Undergrowth is busy yelling about his roots. This could be over very soon.
I turn back to discover that plant-girl is not where I left her. Damn, I was planning on violating his memory of her but she's now out of reach. She's moving rapidly, suspended in a weird framework of vines and motile plants, towards the edge of the city's limits. Wait, it can't be…
Diablos!
Dozens of the damn things begin to rise out of the foliage, discarded by children long since absorbed into the growth. Hundreds more are dropping out of low orbit and being met with walls of powerful, angry vegetation. That said, it seems molecularly sharp circular saws and plasma throwers are more than a match for huge motile vines and their projectile spines.
Undergrowth seems to be going ape at this and sending all kinds of resources to try and deal with the new threat, despite the fact that he's growing smaller and browner with each passing moment. Ignoring the deadly maelstrom that her minions are creating with the robots, the girl returns and begs her 'father' to tell her what's wrong. He's about to answer when…
A massive blue light shines up from the earth, cutting the plant monster off as it speaks and leaving behind a shattered carcass split open on bladed limbs of ice. The girl is caught in the blast and plummets to the ground, her lichenous gown collapsing to dust under the strain. In moments, the ghost is there to lie by her side and curse the fates, a horribly similar thing to what my lesser whole likes to relive from the streets of Tokyo.
The world fades around me.
The tube shatters the instant that I punch it. It's almost as if it doesn't have any will to endure and that seems somewhat apt give the contents. I catch the beautiful woman's body in my arms, ignoring the pressure of the liquid cascade and carry her in my arms like a husband would a wife into their home.
It's a sad business but someone will have to do this eventually. Fortunately, the finality of the situation may be reversed if I'm willing to pay the price for it.
Extending every sense I have across the numbing surfaces of the room, I find the door controls and use a little portion of Lotus to drag the contacts open. Outside lie the prone forms of both Passion and the demon, whatever he is, though I'm beginning to remember a character from north-western regional news, a ghost superhero.
Passion dissipates and the hair flows back into me, like the rest of the duplicates on my silent command.
The ghost stirs as the dust beside his head is disturbed by my foot. His eyes rise up my dripping form to the body laying peacefully in my arms.
"No, not Sam. No, please, don't take her away from me again."
"This girl has been effectively dead for a long time, Daniel," I say patiently and softly, unable to keep my sadness out of my voice.
"No, we kept her alive, I just hadn't figured out how to repair the damage to her…"
"Daniel, stop. She's been brain dead for a long time. The parts that made her human just aren't there any more. This is a shell, a memory, nothing more."
"No, she's alive! I'll kill you for taking her from that tube, Ghost!"
"You'll not be doing anything to me. I am willing to pay a great deal to help you but I need to know that you're capable of looking after her if I can do something about this."
"What?"
"I shall return in three days. You'll be required to give me all the answers I need and to prove to me that you're still sane and not driven mad by loneliness and anger."
"No, I…" he stutters as he tries to get in my way before a trio of thin cuts emerge on his face. He recoils in terror, "that had no ectoplasmic signature."
My time with Saint is blessedly short and businesslike this time around.
With the body completely intact, she had been alive as far as medicine could have told before I pulled her from life support, there was little to do but call back the soul and beg forgiveness.
"There now," Saint says calmly in her rich, lilting Afghan accent with warm fire backlighting her eyes and a gentle smile on her lips, "just stay calm, all will be explained," she continues as the young woman beneath her hands begins to writhe.
"Samantha Mason!" I say with enough force behind the words and enough resonant magic to stop her dead in her tracks. I step into the light around the bed before continuing; "You have been effectively dead for a very long times, Samantha and I know that this news will be tortuously difficult to absorb. Please, stay calm and if you have any questions, feel free to ask."
"Who…" she croaks hesitantly, "who are you?"
"I'm someone who very recently met someone who cares a great deal about you. My name is Ron and this is Saint. We're both people who work to try and undo the damage that has been done to the world. We're a little more than freedom fighters but a little less than superheroes."
"Like Danny."
"If that's the name of the young man that you were in love with, I'm afraid his attempts to bring you back from what he saw as the brink took up too much of his time and his efforts in heroism fell by the wayside."
"What? Danny?"
"We'll know more when we return to see him but he had built a labyrinth of strange materials around a portal of some kind and was guarding it and you. He seemed like a lonely man but in this day and age, those of us who can't be implanted often get that way."
"Implanted?"
and with that, I began to tell her the sad story of what had become of the world that she had slept in. The rise of the Diablo legions, the mass chipping and mood control, the rebellion and the slow military advances that Drakken was making into China. Finally, I told her of the Paragons and their works, right up to when Saint brought her back into the fold of the living.
Suffice to say that the rebellion slipped away from a layer of pure Jewish faith to object to the fact that Prophet hadn't been the one to bring her back. I can empathise but short of calling the Judgement, we Jews don't go in for raising the dead much.
Samantha's response to being alive was not something light. She had been in the Beyond, the place where unclaimed souls rest because as every good Jew knows, we get sorted during the End Times. At least she wasn't clawed from the bosom of heaven but the return to sensation was something that had to be learned over.
As we press into the outer regions of the maze and call for him, I wonder how Daniel will respond to her new life. Given that he hadn't accepted her death despite it being physiological fact gives me a little hope at least.
"Are you sure that you're ready for this, Sam?" I ask, worry falling off me like rain. Sam hesitates but Bonnie doesn't.
"She'll be fine. This is like any other situation where you have to see an old flame. Plunge in and then see how you feel."
"You sure?" I ask again as Sam nods slowly.
"Yeah, just how often do you have to pick up your old life after coming back from the dead?"
"This is more like making a new life for yourself amidst the ruins of the old world. You haven't been dead, more sleeping. You have grown up after all," Bonnie smiles as she says it and I can't thank her enough for being here. Both of us are finding this a massive benefit.
I call out to him and after a moment, Daniel comes from the depths. He sees me and steps forwards before locking eyes on Sam. I hear his heart beat once during the minute or so that he stares at her; once, hard.
His knees give way beneath him and he calls out to her through his tears.
"Sam, oh good lord, it's really you. I'm so sorry. This is all my fault!"
She moves out to drop beside him, throwing her arms around her.
"Danny, I'm here, I'm here," she murmurs as she begins to cry as well. Bonnie and I stand together and wait as they talk, slowly and calmly to each other. He keeps trying to apologise for killing her and she keeps sticking to her guns that my account of the event is true; the whole thing was an accident in superheroics.
Eventually, I take the time to prise the two of them apart and begin to interrogate them over the events of the intervening years. His name was Daniel Fenton and she was Sam Mason, two children of a city called Amity Park. His parents had invented some kind of machine that allowed them to punch through the walls of conventional reality to a realm they termed 'the Ghost Zone.' This was apparently the culmination of his father's obsession with the paranormal, though from my personal experience, I would assume that he had punched through to the spirit worlds that the Chinese and Native American peoples considered so important.
The machine had triggered while Danny was exploring the unit, apparently at Sam's urgings and he had become in some way both human and ghost. This had been the beginning of a long cycle of hero-villain propagation until his arch-foe had awoke the entity Undergrowth, which had led to massive damage. He fled to gain training in the ghost-zone and returned to confront the monster and Sam who had been absorbed into the beast's twisted plants.
The Diablo invasion had occurred during the process of his attack, talk about bad luck and the town was retaken primarily by the efforts of the Diablos. The rest of those enslaved by the Growth had been released, albeit with severe muscle wastage, when the creature was defeated.
His mother and best friend Tucker were completely changed by the implanting process while he and his father had proven completely immune for varying reasons. Given that Sam had been seriously wounded in the fight with Undergrowth, his father had helped him to preserve her and then built the fortress that we now stood in. He had left with James Possible's army of free scientists and was currently on the moon, missing his wife. Danny had spent the remaining time since then, nearly three years, virtually alone, taking out his rage on the spirit entities that managed to force their way out through the portal.
It was a sad tale and we could see that listening to Danny tell it was tear Sam apart.
With events virtually resolved, they made their offer. Danny, as Sam points out, is perfectly capable as demon and ghost hunter and with a little training could easily become one of the best agents that we or the Paragons have access to. Sam volunteered to learn from Anne and become a healer, hoping to make amends for the suffering that she herself had caused.
Time will tell if I'm making the right decision accepting.
Author's Note: Had to write this since I saw Danny Phantom. Hope that no-one objects to the abuse of the characters. Whether Danny will recur in other materials, is yet to be seen.