Hi there! I just wanted to say, if you like this story you have to thank. Why? Because this was written for 's challenge!
The Vapor of Time and Nature
Danny wondered briefly what had happened to get him into being about to follow his friends into his parents' portal. Oh yeah.
Flashback:
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ... Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...
Danny, annoyed at the buzzing fly, swatted at it with his sweaty hands to scare it away. "Stupid fly," he mumbled as it finally flew off.
He knew it was just the three of them in the lab – at the moment – but his parents would be back soon. He looked nervously at the clock, half-expecting its hands to have jumped to ten, when his parents said they'd be back in the lab trying to fix the faulty Fenton Portal.
But the hands didn't say it was ten. They said it was nine-thirty, so he and his friends still had another half-hour left before they were guaranteed to get caught. All the same, Danny wished his friends would be just be satisfied already. He didn't want to get caught in the lab with unauthorized personnel at any time of the day.
"Are you guys done looking around yet?" he asked Sam and Tucker. "I've shown you my parents' stuff, I've taken a picture with the stupid jumpsuit, and I've even told you a bit about the portal. Can we go now?"
Sam and Tucker huddled together. After a few seconds, they broke away and Tucker said, "On one condition."
"Yeah?"
Sam smiled. "You've got to ..." she said, making Danny a little nervous, "take a closer look at that portal! Go and see what sort of awesome cool stuff is on the other side."
"I told you – it doesn't work!" Danny objected.
Tucker snorted. "Knowing your parents? They probably just forgot to turn it on or something."
"Yeah," said Danny, "but ... "
"Come on." Sam pleaded. "Please?"
Danny looked at the floor. He sighed. "Alright, I'll go in to my parent's stupid ghost portal." Sam and Tucker cheered. "But only if you two go in with me." He added.
Danny expected his friends to protest and try to get out of it, but they didn't. To his dismay, they just looked at each other, shrugged, and said, "Fair enough."
Danny inwardly groaned – who knew how long that would take?
Seeing his friends about to go inside and turn on the portal while wearing only their street clothes for protection, he called, "Wait! That thing's a major electrical hazard. Maybe we'd better put on some sort of protective clothing first." Danny held up the jumpsuit Sam had taken a picture of him with to show exactly what he meant.
"Come on," said Tucker. "Nothing's going to happen – right Sam?"
Sam scowled. "It's better safe than sorry. I vote we put the jumpsuits on."
Danny and his friends grabbed spare matching jumpsuits from one of the the cupboards and slid them on. The jumpsuits felt weird, but they fit.
Sam and Tucker quickly peeled off the stickers of Danny's dad that decorated the chest of their jumpsuits. When Sam saw that Danny hadn't done anything about the sticker on his jumpsuit, she ordered. "Stop right there!"
"Huh?" Danny asked, turning to face her.
Sam yanked the sticker off his jumpsuit and explained: "You can't go walking around in the Ghost Zone with this on your chest." Tossing the sticker aside, she declared. "We're ready –let's go in!"
Danny should've gotten the clue when that part of his life started to flash in front of his eyes, but he didn't. Reluctantly, he went with his friends into the portal. They were deep enough in that it was dark when Danny tripped. Danny fell into his friends and all three of them headed toward the ground – but something happened before they got there.
One of them must have fallen into the side of the portal, because an electric circuit was completed and a strong current rushed through them. They couldn't help it – the pain was too much for any of them – and they screamed.
After they'd all hit the ground, Danny shakily got up and turned around. "Guys?" he called. "I think we'd better get out of this portal."
With them all experiencing the shock that comes after receiving an injury, not even Sam tried to argue. "Okay," she said. "Come, Tucker." The three of them stumbled out of the portal and collapsed on the floor of the lab.
All three were on their hands and knees panting for a minute, before any of them regained the strength to speak. Tucker probably shouldn't have been talking so soon, but he was the first one to do so. "Danny, Sam," he said. "You two ... look different."
Danny and Sam quickly examined themselves and each other. "We do look different ... " Sam said finally, "and so do you."
"ME?" Tucker yelped, and examined himself.
All three of them did look different. Although their jumpsuits were still matching, the fabric's colors had been inverted. Sam herself was completely black and white, except for a streak of violet running through her hair. Danny's hair had turned white, his hair had green, and his skin had gained a slight tan. Tucker's skin and eyes were completely colored blue – not even the whites or pupils of his eyes retained their normal color. All three of them had strange amulets hanging from their necks. They looked again at each others' strange appearances, with their numb minds taking a bit of time to process the significance of the information.
Then they all gasped in unison, realizing that the new appearances were probably permanent. Sam and Tucker glared at Danny. "Those protective suits worked real well dude," Tucker said sarcastically. "Look what happened to us! Look at these strange mutations! I don't wanna be a mutant!"
"I'm sorry guys," Danny mumbled. "But hey – at least we weren't killed, right?" The timing of his comment was laughable. As soon as he got the words out of his mouth, his right arm phased into the floor, getting him stuck in an awkward position.
"What was that?" Tucker asked.
Sam's eyes went wide as she realized what was wrong with Danny – and what was wrong with the rest of them too. "We're ghosts!" she shrieked. "We didn't survive that accident!"
"What?" Danny asked. "We're ghosts?"
"Nuh-uh," said Tucker. "There's no way we're ghosts. We're all way too young to die! I'm going to look in that portal, say that I don't see our corpses, and then laugh at the thought."
As he slowly turned himself around, Sam crawled over to help Danny get his arm out of the floor. Tucker got a good look at the empty portal and laughed. He called to his friends, "See for yourselves – we're not in there!"
As Sam and Danny took a look, something occurred to Danny. "Uh, guys?" he said nervously. "Mom was saying earlier today how the voltage needed to power that thing would be way more than enough to kill humans – it would be enough to vaporize them!"
"Vaporize?" Sam and Tucker repeated, and gulped.
"Yikes! We really are ghosts, aren't we?" said Tucker.
Danny put his face in his hand. "I should have never let us go in there," he moaned. "Not even with these jumpsuits. The electricity was way more than they could handle!"
Sam took a deep breath. "Well," she said. "I guess we were all stupid enough to go in there and get killed. I think it's time we stop feeling sorry for ourselves and move on. Being a ghost could be sort of cool!"
Danny and Tucker looked at Sam. "Just breathe," she told them. "Even if it's not necessary, it'll still clear your mind."
They did so and immediately felt a little better. That is, until Danny thought of another problem. "G-guys?" he said. "We're still in my parents' lab – and they're ghost hunters! What if they walk in and see us like this?"
Danny looked up at the clock to see how much time they had before his parents were sure to be there. But then he noticed something – the clock still read nine-thirty and its hands weren't moving. "I don't know long we have until they come down here to get back to work," he told his friends. "The clock's broken."
Sam didn't seem worried. "Danny, Tucker, ...take a look at this. This is just weird – even weirder than us being ghosts." She pointed to something up in the top left corner of the lab.
Danny and Tucker followed her finger, and eventually found the small thing she was looking at. It was the fly that was bothering Danny - frozen in mid-flight – almost as if time were not moving at all. "I don't think the clock's broken," Sam whispered.
"Very good," came a strange male voice from the same corner of the room the fly was in. A moment later, the speaker and a female ghost turned visible. The speaker smiled at the three friends. "You've caught on."
Danny, Sam, and Tucker dropped their jaws. They wanted to ask the other ghosts in the lab who they were, but they found their mouths were too dry to ask.
However, it became unnecessary for them to ask. The female ghost floated forward and said. "I am Lifecycle, and this is my brother Clockwork. You'd recognize us by the names of Mother Nature and Father Time. You, Daniel Fenton, Samantha Manson, and Tucker Foley, are the new candidates for a very special position in your local dimensions."
At that moment, rings appeared around Sam's waist, and spread. They transformed her back to the human girl she was before the accident. Shortly afterward, the same happened for Danny and Tucker.
