Hello there, and welcome to the second oneshot! This one is my take on Danny's portal accident in the world of Minecraft. Still based on zilleniose's ender!danny crossover AU.
I don't own either Danny Phantom or Minecraft, I don't own the idea of this AU, please don't sue me.
Description: The End Portal might have been off-limits, but it didn't work anyway, so what would be the harm in showing it to a couple friends?
Portal
His parents' lab was supposed to be strictly off-limits to anyone who wasn't family. Most of the time, it was.
But yesterday, his parents had finished working on their new End Portal - a device that would, in theory, create a pathway between their lab and the End, the dimension from which Endermen supposedly came.
Like a lot of their inventions, it hadn't worked. Their kids hadn't been surprised, but they themselves were devastated. The portal had been months of effort and hard work, late nights spent working out crafting recipes and mining for materials. And it had all been for nothing.
Now, they couldn't stand to be in the lab. The intricate-looking but useless Portal was situated smack in the middle of the room (a decision made when they were sure it would work), and they couldn't take such a visible reminder of their failure without getting depressed.
Which, Danny reasoned, made this the perfect time to show it to his friends.
Tucker and Sam already knew about the Portal. Danny had been complaining about his parents' devotion to it for almost as long as they'd been building it. Both of them were more excited to see it than Danny was - Tucker because of his undying love for anything complicated and technological, and Sam because of her fascination with anything creepy and with monsters in general - so Danny figured they should get the chance to see it, even though it didn't work.
Normally, at least one of his parents was in the lab at most hours - the only exception being late at night when they were sleeping. However, having Sam and Tucker over so late didn't usually work out too well. But now, the lab was empty most of the time. Even better, the day after the Portal's failed unveiling, his parents had a parent-teacher conference with Jazz in tow - no doubt it would just be a lot of praising Jazz's devotion to her studies, but it was the perfect opportunity, so Danny had invited Sam and Tucker over to his house after school.
"Wow, I can't believe this is your basement, dude," Tucker said, looking at all the various corners of the lab. The walls were made of blastproof obsidian (which was a good thing considering how often inventions - especially his dad's - exploded), and strewn about the room were various machines and technological instruments. The smell of redstone dust, like clay and ozone mixed together, was thick in the air.
"I can't believe your parents made all this stuff," Sam said, studying an intricate layout of redstone dust, torches, and switches. Her gaze shifted to the large, vaguely square-shaped layout of redstone, mostly-sandstone blocks, and ender pearls in the middle of the room.
"Is that the portal?" she asked.
"Yeah," Danny said. "Looks a lot more impressive than it is, really. The most it's done is give off some particles, and that was only right after they tried to activate it."
"Still, this thing looks advanced," Tucker said, hands hovering mere inches away from the Portal, itching to get his hands on it.
"Yeah, which is why you shouldn't mess with it," Danny said, glaring. Tucker's hands reluctantly retreated to his pockets.
"Oh, come on, Danny," Sam said, walking over to join the two boys. "He's just curious. Don't pretend like you're not even a little bit interested in what's on the other side of that Portal."
"Okay, it is pretty interesting, just . . . you guys aren't really supposed to be down here, much less messing around with my parents' inventions."
"Oh, relax, Danny," Sam said. "Your parents will never know we were down here."
She paused to pull something out that Danny hadn't noticed before - a camera.
"Now, I want some pictures of this thing," she said. "Danny, you want to get in the frame?"
"Why me?" Danny asked.
"It's your parents' portal," Sam said. "You in or not?"
"Sure, why not?" Danny said.
For the next few minutes, Sam almost-continuously ordered Danny into different poses near the Portal, becoming gradually more and more ridiculous.
"Geez, Sam," Danny said from his position standing on the edge of the Portal. "What's up with these pictures? I mean, it's not like anyone but the three of us is ever going to see them."
"I've been taking classes," Sam said. "Composition, lighting - I wanted to try it out, okay? Besides, I've never had anything as cool as the Portal to photograph before."
"Okay, but why do I have to be in so many of these pictures?" Danny asked, shuffling to the side in accordance with Sam's hand gesture. "I mean, couldn't you . . . "
Danny's left foot slipped off the back of the sandstone block, and Danny fell into the area ringed by sandstone that should have been the portal.
Thankfully, as the teens knew, the portal didn't work, so instead of falling into another dimension, Danny just landed on the floor and got the wind knocked out of his lungs.
"Danny!" Sam called, rushing to the edge of the Portal. "Are you okay?"
Danny, still struggling to fill his lungs, couldn't say anything, but he nodded, pushing himself off the ground. Sam reached out a hand to help him up, and he reached for her hand in return.
But before they connected, there was a shift in the air. The pressure of static electricity pressed against the skin of the three teens, and the smell of ozone - and something else, something they couldn't identify - filled the room.
Danny looked down at his hand, the one that was still on the ground.
It was lying in a pile of now-scattered redstone dust.
Apparently the problem with his parents' Portal was not a fundamental one, but merely a slight misplacement of the redstone, because now the Portal was humming to life, kicking out clouds of purple and black particles so thick that Danny lost sight of the lab, of Tucker, even of Sam. Only the faintest outline of Sam's pale hand was visible.
"Danny!" Sam and Tucker called simultaneously.
Danny sprung to his feet, rushed towards Sam's hand, the only marker of the edge of the Portal, but he was too late.
The Portal kicked into full gear, and Danny couldn't move.
The pain was immediate, and terrible - like his entire body was being shredded, ripped apart molecule by molecule, and electricity was flowing where his blood should have been. His vision was flashing, back and forth between two scenes, two worlds.
Thick, black clouds of particles. His parents' lab.
Endless white plains under a pitch black sky, dotted with the tall, menacing figures of Endermen. The End.
So it existed, Danny thought faintly. The pain was starting to feel foreign, a degree removed from his mind. His thoughts were fading.
He was dying.
Then came a new pain, a doubling of what he felt - almost like he was dying twice at once, or at least dying twice as horribly.
There was a sickening feeling in his chest, as all the muscles contracted and hardened. Small, sharp shards were working their way through skin, muscle, even bone, into the center of Danny's chest, and gathering there, piecing themselves together, and then hardening into place, into a perfect and heavy sphere.
The pain was lessening now, and Danny realized he had been screaming. His vision slowed its flashing, until he was in each place for a few seconds, and then maybe half a minute, and then it stopped flashing altogether, and he began making out the details of his parents' lab.
Or at least, its ceiling.
Danny propped himself up with his arms so he could look around - he really didn't feel ready to be standing just yet.
It seemed Sam and Tucker had pulled him out of the Portal, and he looked over and found it stable, kicking out a moderate amount of black particles from a glowing black ethereal portal.
Okay, so the Portal definitely worked now.
But where were Sam and Tucker?
A quick scan of the room found them huddled over by the stairs, whispering to each other in urgent tones. Sam seemed to be crying, or at least, there were tear tracks running down her cheeks, paved with her dark Goth makeup.
Her eyes flitted towards him, and Danny felt a sudden, sharp pain in his shoulder. She looked away almost immediately, and the pain vanished as suddenly as it came.
What exactly had happened?
"Guys?" Danny asked, surprised when his friends flinched at the sound of his voice. "What's going on?"
Okay, admittedly, he did sound a bit weird, distorted and raspy. But hey, he'd just been caught in an impossible limbo between dimensions. A sore throat wasn't that unbelievable, right?
"Oh man," Tucker said. "Oh man, oh man, oh man. What do we do?"
"I don't know," Sam said.
"Guys? What's going on?" Danny asked again. He could feel dread rising in him as he noticed that his voice was sounding too weird for it to be a sore throat, and he could have sworn that his arms weren't long enough to prop him up this tall.
"Danny?" Sam asked hesitantly. She seemed to be very carefully and determinedly not looking at him, but rather a bit to his left.
"Who else?" he asked. There was his voice again. It was kind of creepy, actually.
"We didn't know, after the Portal turned on everything was happening so fast that we couldn't tell, and then . . ."
Sam didn't seem to know what to say. That was a real first in all the years he'd known her. Sam was the master of witty backtalk and smart excuses, of talking on the fly in general. But now Tucker was taking over the conversation.
"I don't know how we can explain this," he said. "Do your parents have a mirror down here, dude?"
"Of course, they have one over by the - " Danny cut himself off before he could say sink. He'd been able to ignore the way his voice sounded, more or less, when he was talking in short bursts, but now he definitely noticed it, the way his voice sounded like a radio being tuned in and out of the right stations. It wasn't something he was trying to do - he was trying to talk as normally as he could - it was just happening.
"You might want to look in it, dude," Tucker said.
Danny nodded and stood up.
Or tried to.
Had the ceiling always been that low?
Wincing, Danny slouched a bit and walked over to the corner of the room where his parents kept the sink and the mirror above it. He looked into it - and promptly jumped back in surprise.
Under different circumstances, Tucker would have laughed. Maybe Sam, too. But right now there was nothing funny about Danny stumbling away from the mirror, trying to figure out what kind of elaborate trick his friends were playing on him - because this had to be a trick, right? Nothing like this could happen in real life.
In the mirror, where Danny's reflection should have been, was an Enderman.
Sure, it was more human-looking than the average Enderman, with discernible hair and a more humanoid body shape, not quite as tall or thin as the average Enderman, but definitely an Enderman. There was no arguing with the freakishly long arms and legs, pitch-black skin, and glowing purple eyes.
What was scarier, though, was that the creature in the mirror was copying Danny's every move, almost like it was his actual reflection.
It was.
This had to be a dream. It couldn't be real, could it? People didn't become Endermen. It was impossible.
But being caught in the Portal as it turned on . . . that had changed him, hadn't it? He could still feel the heavy sphere resting in his chest - the Enderpearl, he guessed. The part of Endermen that people died trying to get, the thing that sold for incredibly high prices. And now he had one. Inside him.
He focused on the pearl, its solid coolness, simultaneously alien and a natural part of him. Did he even still have a heart? Yes, there it was, faint and weak, pumping at half the speed it should have been.
Come on, he urged it. Start beating like normal again. Prove I'm still human.
And amazingly enough, it did. The heart picked up speed and strength, beating like normal in a few seconds.
Around Danny's ankles, a cloud of purple particles, too thick to see through, formed. It rose, sweeping over his whole body, and then dissipated into thin air.
His reflection - in fact, all of him - was human again. He could still feel the weight of the Enderpearl nestled in his chest, around his ribs, but his heart was beating, and his skin was its normal color, and his eyes no longer glowed purple. He might have been a couple inches taller than he had been that morning, but that was it. He was human again.
Sam and Tucker, who had been watching from the stairway, were entranced.
"Danny?" Sam asked him. Danny turned his head and caught her gaze. The feeling of her eyes on him hurt like fingers pressed against a fresh bruise, and he could feel a faint anger rising inside of him as her gaze lingered, but he still smiled.
"Yeah, Sam," he said. "It's me."