Chapter 1

Eight months earlier...

Seventeen year old Danny Phantom careened through the portal, yelling. It was a strange portal – more violent than he'd ever encountered – and the instant he reached the other side, his powers shorted out, transforming him from Phantom back into Fenton. He landed hard on cool tile and groaned.

Danny heard excited whispers. He looked around and saw a number of men dressed in white lab coats pointing at him. Beyond the men was what was undoubtedly a high-tech laboratory.

Danny started to panic, his heart rate speeding up. This was bad. He really, really didn't want to be subjected to lots and lots of really painful experiments. He tried transforming but only got a small crackle of light before the rings fizzled out. He looked behind him; the portal was still open. He scrambled towards it.

"Don't let it get away!" someone shouted. The portal shut down just as Danny reached it, and he slammed hard into the circuit-covered wall, unlike any artificial portal he'd ever seen before.

Shit, Danny thought. He whirled around, back pressed against the wall, and saw two men dressed as soldiers moving forward, brandishing a baton and a pair of handcuffs.

"Stay away!" Danny yelled, shoving his hands forward and automatically channeling his ghostly energy from his core. To his surprise, a bright green ecto-blast erupted from his hands and slammed into one of the soldiers, sending him flying.

I can't transform, but my powers still work, Danny realized.

Danny's attack sent the lab into pandemonium. The remaining soldier rushed at him, waving the baton. Danny intangibly stepped through the baton, letting the soldier crash into the wall. The scientists were backing away while frantically calling for help.

"Test subject 002 of Code-R is hostile! We need backup!" one cried.

I'm nobody's test subject, Danny internally snarled. He let his eyes glow green and his hands become ringed in ectoplasmic flame. I need to get out of here. But first…

The scientists had enough sense to scramble away when Danny began blasting their equipment. While his ecto-blasts weren't as powerful in human form as in ghost form, they were enough to reduce the complex machines and computers in the lab to scrap. Danny turned and blasted where the portal had been, scorching the wall and utterly destroying the circuitry that had been there.

Mistake.

Danny barely had the sense of mind to turn intangible before the portal exploded, consuming the world in fire.

Why did you target the portal? Of course it was going to explode! Idiot! Danny berated himself as he waited for the smoke to clear.

He froze as he made out the shapes through the smog. Charred human corpses, limbs skewed awkwardly, and pained moans of the dying greeted him. He'd caused this, with his careless actions.

Shit, Danny reiterated, feeling awful. His throat clogged and he found it hard to breathe. It wasn't the first time he'd seen death – try as he might, he wasn't always in time to save the populace of Amity Park from ghosts – but it was the first time he'd caused someone else to die. He wondered if it made him like Dan.

No, Danny decided, shivering. This was an accident. Dan killed on purpose, for fun. You're not like him.

Then Danny heard sirens in the distance. I need to get out of here. He turned invisible – one of the few powers he could wield as a human as deftly as he could a ghost – and ran out of the wreckage. Clear blue sky and the bright sun greeted him, along with clean, arching skyscrapers.

Danny looked around. He knew Amity Park like the back of his hand now since he'd spent so much time flying around, and where he was looked nothing like anywhere he'd seen. Amity Park didn't even have skyscrapers this tall!

Right, portal, Danny groaned. Let's figure out where I am. He took off flying – more difficult and slower in his human form, especially while he was holding invisibility, but still doable and faster than walking – and soared upward, to the top of one of the skyscrapers. What he saw took his breath away.

A giant, sprawling metropolis greeted him in all direction. Some parts of the city seemed more derelict than others, but the sheer opulence of the wealthy area was amazing. Looming in the distance was a mountain partially covered in metal scaffolding.

Okay, definitely not in Kansas anymore¸ Danny thought weakly. He knew enough about the major cities of the world that this one was totally different from anything he'd ever seen. Am I in the future? He shuddered as he remembered his one other journey to the future. Hopefully, this was nothing like that disastrous trip.

He'd taken plenty of trips to the past, though, and there were a few rules he'd learned along the way. Of most important were that you needed to blend in as best you could, starting with language and appearance.

Still invisible, Danny jumped off the skyscraper and swooped down to where he could see people walking on the sidewalk. He drifted close enough to hear some conversation and was relieved to find that, like the scientists in the lab, these people spoke English. They also wore clothes similar to his own – business suits, dresses, jeans, and t-shirts. He didn't have to do anything fancy to blend in, then.

Danny soared into a dark alleyway and landed with a sigh of relief. Flying was tough in human form. Making sure no one was watching, a skill honed over years of keeping a secret identity, he turned visible again and casually sauntered out of the alleyway.

Danny wandered the city for a bit, picking up tidbits of everyday life. It seemed that this place wasn't so different from the big cities back home, at least from what he heard. He eventually spotted a bookstore and approached it, thinking it would be an ideal place to gather some information about where he'd landed.

Britannian Books? Danny wondered. What's Britannia?

A small bell chimed as he entered the shop, and he was greeted by a bespectacled man at the counter. "Hello, how may I help you today?" he said.

"I'm, uh, looking for history books," Danny replied.

"In the back of the shop, down the third row."

"Thanks."

Danny walked down the identified row and scanned the books. Here we go. History of Britannia. Again, what's Britannia? Danny pulled the book from the shelf and began to read. The further he got, the more alarmed he became.

The United States of America didn't exist; George Washington's rebellion had failed. Instead, it was a superpower called Britannia, an analogue to Great Britain, which had conquered a number of different localities throughout the globe, naming them Areas and designating them with numbers. National policy dictated that the original occupants of the Areas, termed Numbers, were to be treated as inferior to full-blooded Britannians. The whole horrifying package was wrapped in imperialist, might-makes-right rhetoric.

Clutching the book to his chest, Danny ran back up to the front, where the shopkeeper looked up at him, alarmed.

"Where am I?" Danny asked breathlessly.

"Sir, you're in Britannian Books—"

"No, no! I mean, what city are we in? Which Area?" Danny demanded.

The shopkeeper looked at him strangely. "The Tokyo Settlement, Area 11. Are you sure you're alright, sir?"

Danny managed to nod, despite the roaring in his ears. He was in Japan? He set the history book on the counter and stumbled over to an armchair, breathing rapidly.

Calm… calm! he thought hysterically. There's a simple explanation for this place being so different from home.

Danny thought of a lecture Clockwork had once given him on how portals worked. Apparently, the Ghost Zone was unstable enough that it occasionally formed portals to other worlds unlike the living world it was most closely tied to. These portals tended to be much more violent than the average portal, and Danny dimly recalled with horror that the passage through the artificial portal had been much rougher than usual. Danny had chalked it up to it being a bad artificial portal, but what if it wasn't? What if it was something else?

Danny concentrated and found that the familiar hum of the Ghost Zone, always present ever since he'd learned how to listen for it, was missing, replaced by a sleepy awareness so vast it had him almost falling out of the chair.

"Shit," he whispered, voice cracking. He was in an alternate reality and, unlike back in the living world of his home, he couldn't simply wait for a portal to open. Dimensional portals were extremely rare, according to the lecture. And he'd blown up the artificial portal. Which meant…

He was stuck here. Maybe forever.

Danny fought the urge to scream. He grabbed at his hair and hunched over, feeling as though he'd had the wind knocked out of him. What would happen to his family when he went missing? What about Sam and Tucker? What about Amity Park? Competent as Valerie was, she couldn't fight everything. What would Vlad do?

No. This isn't the end. I've been in tougher scrapes before. I'll find my way out of this one, Danny thought stubbornly, fighting to get himself back under control. I need to find the lab, get whatever data I can from it, and reconstruct the portal. Easy-peasy. He took a deep breath.

It was then that he noticed the shopkeeper on a phone. "…yes, he's seemed to have had some sort of panic attack—"

Danny had heard enough. The last thing he needed was to be carted off to the hospital, where they'd find he lacked any form of Britannian identification with him (he had his United States driver's license and some cash with him, none of which would prove to be useful here). And if worse came to worst, they'd run tests on him and find that he wasn't as human as he pretended to be.

He bolted out of the shop, ignoring the shopkeeper's calls behind him. He shoved his way through the crowd, people looking at him strangely, until he came upon another dark alley that he could duck into. He calmed his beating heart and, making sure no one would notice him, turned invisible. He flew into the air just as a pair of men dressed in uniform – either soldiers or police officers – dashed by the alley, looking for him.

Danny invisibly floated above the crowd and breathed a sigh of relief before flying off. He needed to find that lab. Using the sun as his guide, Danny returned in the direction of the lab.

What he found was less than reassuring.

A black cloud of smoke billowed from the shell of the lab, and the area was swarming with police/soldiers and firemen. There was no way he'd be able to sneak in there and get anything, even if he was invisible and intangible. Too many people would be looking for odd things. Besides, he'd blown up the lab pretty well. Not much was left.

Danny buried his head in his hands as he listened to the commotion below him. Okay, so the easy way is out, he thought. He was more stubborn than people gave him credit for, though. What had the scientist said about him? Test subject 002… of Code-R? If he could find test subject 001, or the rest of Code-R, he had a chance at returning home.

But what am I going to do in the meantime? Danny moaned as his stomach growled. Flying for such an extended period of time in human form was taxing.

The police were looking for him in the wealthy part of the city, so Danny headed to the closest ruin of a city he could see to avoid them. He touched down next to a damaged high-rise and, seeing no one, released his hold on invisibility with a sigh.

What am I going to do now?


...I have absolutely no excuse for this. This plot bunny just wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. So, I'll be splitting my time among this, The Thief, and Shadowfall. Hope you guys enjoy this one! I enjoyed writing it.

-HM