HAPPY DANNIVERSARY, EVERYONE! :D
...Okay, so the Danniversary was YESTERDAY. ; Look, I TRIED to get this in on time, really I did! This whole project has been one big epic failure. I had a poster that I wanted to put on my DA account to advertise, but after my progress was deleted THREE TIMES, there was simply no way to finish it in time. Then, as I was called out of town yesterday, I brought the first chapter on a flash-drive so that I could upload it when I found some time. Guess whose flash-drive decided to burn out and break the night of? [sighs sadly] I really wanted to make this a big deal, and it blows up in my face. I'm sorry, I tried my best.
Anyway, now that my apology is out of the way, let's get on to the good news: I'M BACK! :D Yes, after a long...whoa, five years, I have returned to my beloved roots with some brand-new fanfiction. Are you all excited? I know I am. :D
Anyway, to summarize this little story that I'm premiering my big comeback with: As you all can imagine, my writing has grown leaps and bounds since the last time I've posted here. I know we all love our classic cartoons, but now that we're all quite a bit older, everyone's tastes have probably grown up a little - I know mine have. Enter my newest literary series, "Za Kousei". (The Rebirth, for those of you who don't speak Japanese (or do and dislike my poor translation).) The idea is to take the original storyline - here, the story of Daniel Fenton and his adventures as a half-ghost superhero - and rewrite it with a slightly darker twist: like giving it a new life, a rebirth.
Hence why it was a really big deal to post this on the Danniversary - how symbolic, right?
Anyway, I've put a LOT of time into this project, and I really think it's a cool idea, so even if you don't like the sound of it, at least give it a try - you might be surprised! And with that, let the rebirth of Danny Phantom commence!
WARNING (because LawyerBot says, and Mayflower doesn't want to get sued): Story currently rated T for the potential of violence, disturbing imagery, and other adult themes. Rating may change in the future, but we're going to go ahead and warn you now. :)
"Guys, I REALLY don't think we should be messing around down here."
"Danny, where ELSE are we going to use an ouija board?"
Fourteen-year-old Daniel Fenton - better known to his friends as Danny - sighed as he was once again proven wrong by his best friend, Samantha Manson. He, Miss Manson, and other best friend Tucker Foley, were currently hidden away in the bowels of the Fenton household basement, which had been converted into, of all things, a laboratory. You see, Danny's parents, Jack and Madelyn Fenton, were...odd, to say the least. Raised to become intelligent, well-rounded scientists, a few years of university turned their attention to paranormal activities. Twenty years and two children later, the Fenton parents were known across the globe by studies of their field as two of the leading experts on ghostly and demonic activity.
Their basement laboratory was crawling with various gadgets and weapons for measuring, capturing, and experimenting on these lost spirits, but their greatest invention of all was the Fenton Portal. When active, this portal became a door between our world and the next, allowing mere mortals to go forth and explore the world of those beyond the grave.
Unfortunately, it didn't work at the moment, so it was merely a wired shell of what could and soon would be. Knowing of this valuable area of failed experimentation, Samantha (better known as Sam) realized that it would be the perfect place to toy with the ouija board her grandmother had gotten her for her recent birthday.
"I still don't get how this thing's supposed to work," Tucker said, still carefully analyzing the planchette. "I mean, what is it? A magnet? Are we supposed to move it without telling each other? I mean, this is a piece of wood with some glass in it - it can't move by itself."
"The GHOSTS are going to move it, Tucker," Sam scowled. "That's the whole POINT - would you please stop over-analyzing everything?" She shook her head with a tsk. "I swear, one of these days, you're going to BECOME a robot, not just be obsessed with them."
"Yeah, and it'll be because of one of your spooky ghost-friends," Tucker snickered, earning him a swift smack from the young goth girl.
Danny sighed again, brushing his thick, ebony locks out of his hair and boredly glancing around the laboratory. Even with his best friends' usual arguing, the basement had an eerie calm over it. Despite the steel walls and tables of experimental weapons and detectors, all four walls were decorated with various mythic and religious symbols. The one that always caught his eye was the oversized dream-catcher that hanged over the door leading in from the stairs, the one with the cross sewn into the woven center. Danny's mother had recieved it from a local medicine man on one of her excavations of the ancient ruins of Mexico - the man had claimed that it would repel evil spirits. Considering he never saw one, he could only assume it worked.
"Hey, Earth to Danny - you still with us?"
"Huh?" Danny jumped, snapping out of his musings and returning to his friends. "Y-Yeah, sorry, zoned for a second."
"Obviously," Sam said with a roll of her eyes. "Can you hit the lights?"
Danny clapped his hands three times, causing the line of fluorescent lights that lit the room to go out. It was impossible to make the lab completely dark, though - not only were there two dim, red emergency lights that never went out, there were a few glow-in-the-dark crosses in the room, and the Fenton Portal always seemed to resonate with a spooky, lime-green light.
Not that Sam minded - if anything, it looked like she appreciated the atmospheric lighting. "Okay, guys, hands on the planchette." Spying the less-enthused of the two boys, she delivered another swift smack to Mr. Foley. "That means you, too, Tucker, quit fuddling with your stupid headpiece."
"Sor-RY, Your Gothic Majesty," Tucker pouted, having to turn off his music and actually participate in this little game.
Once all six hands were on the wooden seeing piece, Sam started the informal ceremony by moving the glass over the words to spell out the first question:
HELLO ARE THERE ANY SPIRITS HERE?
One minute went by. Then another. "Guess that answers that question," Tucker snickered.
"I'd smack you if I could move my hand," Sam growled. "Give it a little time."
"Come on, Sam, this is a bust, give it up."
"You shut up!"
"Hey, guys, here's an idea," Danny interjected, always having to be the peacekeeper between his two friends. "How about we NOT fight while we're trying to summon a ghost?"
Sam and Tucker both opened their mouths to fire counterarguments, but stopped when the planchette violently jerked and began spelling its own response:
HELLO THANK YOU FOR SUMMONING ME
Danny and Tucker were stunned to silence - Sam's board had worked! Sam, on the other hand, was lit up with excitement. "See, guys, I told you we'd get someone here!"
"Okay, that's great, can we be done?" Danny asked. He couldn't help but get an uneasy feeling from the wandering spirit that they had summoned.
"Danny, you're kidding, right?" Sam asked. "Come on, this is a huge breakthrough!" Not waiting for Danny to retort, the young Manson took charge once more and spelt the next question:
WHO ARE YOU? WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
The spectre replied shortly after:
NOT YOUR CONCERN
"Yeah, I think that means he doesn't want to be bothered," Tucker pointed out with a nervous laugh.
"Yeah, it's late, maybe we woke him up, we should let him get back to what he was doing," Danny agreed.
"You two are such babies," Sam tsked. "He hasn't done anything--"
Mid-argument, the planchette began to move again:
I HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU
DON'T MOVE
"Okay, that's it!" Tucker jumped panickedly. "I am SOOO..."
"What?" Danny questioned.
Tucker swallowed nervously. "I can't let go of the glass."
Now alerted to their situation, Danny and Sam also attempted to jerk their hands from the wooden glass-piece, only to find that Tucker was right - all three of them were magically glued to the planchette. Sam tried manuevering the seeing piece around the board in hopes of dismissing the phantom, but to no avail - the planchette simply refused to budge.
"Sam, PLEASE tell me this is part of the game!" Danny begged panickedly.
"This is part of the game?" Sam chuckled nervously, at a loss for anything else to say. She had read plenty of books about ouija boards, but this isn't a situation she ever saw described.
Suddenly, the glowing wires that filled the empty shell of the Fenton Portal began to surge, pulsating with a fiery lime light that threatened to burn into your eyes at the peak of its pulses. The various spectral activity readers began going berserk - those closest to the Portal outright shattered, and a haunting alarm sounded...if only for a second before it, too, was overheated and shut down in the most violent manner possible.
When all of the noise and confusion finally reached its peak, the Portal exploded. Wires busted loose and shrapnel flew everywhere as Danny, Sam, and Tucker were all viciously thrown from the ouija board, which was now little more than a pile of splintered wood lost among the debris. Sam was shot off to one side, smashing painfully into one of the laboratory desks, the planchette piece cracked into her face, leaving a bloody streak down her pale face. Tucker was pushed through a crack in the Portal siding, leaving him jammed into a cluster of broken, sparking computer equipment, one of the loose antennae pushed through the back of his left ear. Both were deadly still, obviously knocked unconscious by the explosion...if not worse.
Finally, there was Danny. Being as close to the exit of the portal as he was, he suffered the least amount of damage, suffering no more than a few bumps and bruises as he was thrown across the room and landed at the bottom of the stairwell leading into the Fenton household. While he was shaking with immense pain and struggling to catch his breath, he was still conscious - barely, but conscious. Knowing that he had to find a way to get up and assess the damage, he forced his icey-blue eyes open.
Floating above him was...well, for lack of a better word, though Danny refused to believe it, a ghost. It was a shadowy sort of demon, humanly formed but with a distinct lack of features except for a pair of white gloves to cover his clawed hands, a long scar running down the side of his face, a wisping mess of snow-white hair, and two piercing lime-green eyes that resembled the color of the Fenton Portal right as it exploded. Danny was in complete disbelief - even if he had the physical capacity to move, he probably wouldn't have done so out of fear.
The spectre moved swiftly, flying around the perimeter, eyes darting back and forth to explore its new surroundings. Once familiar with the area, it flew towards the stairs (paying no mind to Danny), only to be stopped by an invisible force that caught hold of him at the doorway. The ghost choked and writhed mid-air for a few moments, only to be pushed back into the lab. Danny noticed it turn a venomous glare upwards - was the dream-catcher above the door affecting him somehow?
Its original plot, whatever it was, had just been foiled, so the ghost scrounged for a Plan B. First it looked to Tucker, picking him up by the shoulder and pulling him from the electrical hazard he was laying in, the stem of metal still jutting out from under his favorite red hat. (Danny cringed to think how much blood that beret was disguising.) The spirit fuddled with the broken antennae, adjusting it in such a way that you could barely tell where Tucker's BlueTooth headset had ended and the foreign obstruction began. A light twitch of Tucker's fingers gave Danny the hope that he was still alive, but the ghost shook his head with an almost-frustrated sigh and moved on.
Then, the apparition turned to Samantha. It pulled the wooden playing piece off of her face, exposing the splintered, shattered mark it had left around her eye. (Danny almost smiled at the serendipity of the sight for a second - Sam had always had an infatuation with spiders, and the mark vaguely looked like a spider's web.) While the wood easily peeled away from the site of injury, the orb of glass did not wish to cooperate the same way. It appeared to be stuck fast to her eye socket, and didn't look like it was going to come out cleanly. The spirit didn't seem to have a problem with that - after assessing the damage, he placed the palm of his gloved hand overtop the obstructing orb and pushed down. There was a flash of ghastly green light and a gut-wrenching ker-pop that Danny could only assume was Sam's eyeball giving way to the pressure. Looking over her more, Sam's favorite amethyst necklace - the one her grandmother had found for her, the one she often used as a dowering tool in her amateur searches for the beyond - had caught in the collar of her neck, half-fused into her skin by the heat of the blast. The phantom tapped the jewel a few times, causing the gem to glow a bright shade of lilac every time it touched, then tore the necklace away, placing it in the palm of Sam's hand and folding her fingers together. The wound was shallow enough - despite its precarious position, it appeared harmless. Still, the spook would not be satisfied, and it dismissed Sam just as quickly as it had done Tucker.
Finally, the spectre turned its piercing green eyes to Danny. Upon noticing the phantom's turn towards him, the young Fenton quickly dropped his head and closed his eyes, feigning unconsciousness - perhaps the spirit would notice Danny's general lack of injury and go on his merry way.
The ghost chuckled. "I saw that."
Danny continued his act of innocent ignorance, only to have his eyes snap open once more when the spirit grabbed hold of his jaw and roughly yanked his face until Danny's gentle blue eyes were locked onto its burning green ones.
The ghost smirked as he looked Danny over. "I like your eyes. They remind me of my own before I died."
Danny gasped for the breath to speak, too rattled by fear and panic and pain to do so easily. "Please...What do...You want?..."
The spectre's grin only grew, a pointed white sneer on his shadowy face as his claws dug into the delicate flesh under Danny's jawbone. Despite looking barely solid, the shadow's hold was enough to break skin, as Danny could feel a gentle stream of blood running down his neck. The spectre leaned in close, his breath ice-cold, yet burning against Danny's ear, his voice barely above a whisper - given the eerie silence of the destroyed laboratory, it was all he needed.
"I've been looking for a way out of that Hell-hole for quite some time now," he explained, staying perfectly calm and horrendously terrifying all at the same time. "However, it seems that I'm stuck in this room until I find some way to sneak out - somewhere to hide."
Before Danny had any idea what the spirit was up to, it jabbed its ghostly hand through the center of his chest, as if threatening to grab at his heart - while it didn't leave a physical mark, Danny's injured body was racked with pain all the same, yet he barely had the energy to let out a shriek. No, he could only breathlessly beg - beg for help, beg for mercy, beg for salvation - as whatever power he had left was drained away and he began to drift back into a sea of darkness.
Before total unconsciousness hit, however, he caught one last glimpse of the demon - his piercing eyes seemed to burn through the wave of swirls and spirals that sent Danny off to a world of black. And while he couldn't see the phantom's lips move, its final words were the last thing the young Fenton managed to catch as he passed out:
"And I think you'll work just fine as my little 'somewhere'..."
Did you love it? Did you hate it? DO YOU LOVE CHEESE?! Well, I'll never know what's on your mind until you hit the little periwinkle-colored button and drop me a line - see you next time, everybody!
§ TUCKER'S MAYFLOWER, SIGNING OFF! §