Morning came too quickly. Danny groaned, trying to hide his face from the sudden brightening that was the Ghost Zone's dawn but quickly gave up. They'd made surprisingly good time yesterday, especially since he'd carried the sleeping teens another ten or eleven miles before finding a spot similar enough to their campsite that they wouldn't know they'd moved. It was a good thing that halfas, even teenaged ones, didn't need much sleep. Still, they would need to get going if they wanted to keep their lead.
"Hey, Sam. Sam, wake up."
The Goth girl groaned. "Five more minutes, Mr. Hyde," she moaned.
Her boyfriend stiffened. "Who's Mr. Hyde?"
Sam blinked sleepily at him. "My stuffed bat-bear," she mumbled, stretching luxuriously. "You should be jealous, Danny. He sleeps with me every night."
The hybrid laughed. He remembered the plushie now; Tucker claimed that it gave him nightmares. Of course Sam slept with it. "Well, then, I'll just need to lay some kind of claim to you so Mr. Hyde the bat-bear knows who he's messing with." He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips.
Sam grinned. "You can stop, I'm awake now," she joked. Then, noticing the others, she frowned. "Danny, what are we going to do? I'm not sure if they can survive the Far Frozen."
He sighed. "If the worst happens, I'll fly whoever's freezing to the nearest medical facility. I can carry two, three if someone rides piggyback, and Valerie can bring the other person on her jet sled once we convince her not to shoot me. I'm not going to let them die, Sam, though I really hope it doesn't come to that."
She nodded. "I know. It's just that you sometimes forget full-humans don't have your tolerance for the cold."
Danny smiled. "I'm an ice elemental. What did you expect? Personally, I'm more worried about keeping Frostbite quiet. He still refuses to call me Danny."
Soft laughter. "Yeah. He'll call you Great One, Mighty Conqueror of Pariah, Savior of the Ghost Zone, Champion-Defender, Ma-"
"I get the idea. I just hope we can make him call me by name."
"Not gonna happen."
"Yeah, I know. Now come and help me wake these guys up."
After a meager breakfast of Valerie's rations and leftover banana-pears, the ragged group set out. Danny ate the smallest meal- as a halfa, he could "feed" off the emotional energy of humans and even ghosts, though he preferred to rely on human food. "Eating" emotions always felt uncomfortably close to cannibalism. Now, though, he had to spare food for the full-humans. Besides, it wasn't like there was a dearth of emotional energy for him to absorb.
"On the road again," Danny murmured as they resumed their journey.
By midmorning, a great deal of the preps' awe had worn off. After all, you can only stare at a green sky for so long before it gets old. They were still afraid, of course- no one was that stupid- but as the luxury of exploring another dimension evaporated, boredom came to replace it. Danny held their misery off until lunch by pointing out interesting landmarks and telling them about ghosts, but when lunch rolled around everyone was heartily sick of that conversation.
"We could sing or something," suggested Star between bites of her granola bar. "I mean, we haven't seen any ghosts or anything."
Sam glared. "Didn't you learn your lesson after last night?" she hissed. "You just jinxed it!"
"Ghost child!" bellowed a deep male voice, right on schedule. "Relinquish to me what is rightfully mine!"
"Sorry," squeaked Star.
Danny stared at where the voice was coming from. "Uh, look, Mr. Ghost sir, there aren't any ghost children here, and none of us have anything that belongs to you. Have you checked the lost and found?" He held up three fingers and looked significantly at Sam. The Goth girl nodded and her boyfriend returned his attention to the ghost. Good, he hadn't noticed Sam's actions.
"Very funny, whelp," snapped Skulker, flashing into visibility. "You know what I want- your pelt."
"Ew!" screamed two female voices. Danny ignored them. His eyes flickered towards Sam, who suddenly let out a shriek.
Skulker, not expecting the Goth girl's uncharacteristic reaction, spun around with a confused expression on his metallic face. As he turned, Sam tossed something towards her boyfriend. Danny caught it. In a single fluid motion, he reversed the object's momentum and threw it into the back of the robot's neck. One, two, three bolts popped loose, and the suit's head flew from its shoulders. Skulker really needed to redesign his armor.
Ignoring his classmates' shock, Danny charged, scooping up the head and carrying it away from the body. "According to my parents, Skulker here is powerless without his super-suit." The boy stuck his hand into the robot's mouth before pulling it back. The mouth was blocked by a sheet of metal that he couldn't phase through. Huh, maybe Skulker had redesigned his suit.
"He looks like a monster, but he's really just a little blobby thing," the halfa continued. Frowning in concentration, he poked a finger into the head's eye socket. "He lives in the suit's head, so I have to get him out. It's kind of like how the ancient Egyptians would take the brains of dead people out through their noses."
"Double ew," whined Paullina.
Danny grinned. "Got him." He showed his classmates the green blobby form.
Skulker glared. Funnily enough, it wasn't half as intimidating without his suit. "I'll get you for this," the hunter vowed.
"That's nice," his enemy replied. Grinning, the hero threw the little ghost as far as he could. "I think we should dissect his battle suit, steal the weapons, and toss the rest of it over the side."
His girlfriend nodded. "Sounds good to me." She looked at the populars. "What are you guys staring at?"
"Fenton cut himself when he was, um, digging around that head," Dash explained. "But now the cut's gone."
"Did you get goop on yourself again?" Sam asked quickly.
"I must have," her boyfriend replied. "I mean, there's no other explanation for why I keep healing so quickly."
Valerie had an idea. "Maybe we should get more ghost goop for your first aid kit." Before anyone could stop her, she grabbed Skulker's head.
"My feet!" exclaimed Paullina. "Put some on my feet!" She tore off Danny's shoes.
The other girl glared. "We should save this for real emergencies instead of a minor discomfort. Don't you know anything about prioritizing?"
Naturally, the cheerleader ignored the huntress's advice. She grabbed Skulker's head, found a blob of ectoplasm, and slathered it all over her feet. Danny flinched. Healing was one of his powers; he really didn't want to explain why the goop cure didn't work on anyone else.
Right on cue, Paullina wailed, "It's not working!" She glared. "Why does it only work on you?"
Think fast, Fenton-Phantom. "Maybe it's because I've been around ghosts all my life? I really don't know."
"Let me try something," Valerie muttered. She picked up Sam's knife, a gorgeous dragon-hilted dagger. It was a thank-you gift from Princess Dora of Aragon after Team Phantom had overthrown her brother and given her the crown. Knife in hand, the huntress advanced on Danny.
Naturally, this made him a wee bit nervous. "What are you doing?"
"I think there's a time limit on how long the ectoplasm works," she explained. "I'm just gonna give you a little nick to make sure."
"No thanks."
"But it might be important," Valerie said. "If we can't store this goop, we shouldn't take any."
"No thanks," the hybrid repeated.
Valerie sighed, stopped. "All right," she muttered sadly. Danny smiled, turned away. The second his back was exposed, the huntress leapt forward, knife flashing.
If Danny had stayed still, Valerie would have danced around him and nicked his face. Unfortunately, the huntress hadn't taken his heroic reflexes into account: one of the rules of combat was keep the face safe. It held important things like eyes and ears, and it was easy to access the neck or brain from there. He dodged, one arm jerking up to deflect the blow. With an unpleasant snick-ing sound, the dragon-hilted dagger tore through Danny's shirt, skin, and muscle.
Dash breathed a horrified curse. Star and Paullina were silent, their mouths opening and closing like fish.
"What was that for?" the hybrid yowled, clutching his wounded limb.
The knife fell from Valerie's lifeless fingers. "Danny… what happened to your arm?"
One look revealed what she was talking about. Danny fought back a curse, schooling his face into an expression of shock. Normal humans didn't have that slight greenish tint in their blood or pulsing turquoise-yes, turquoise- muscles.
His brain whirled, cranking and creaking like a gear in Clockwork's Tower. "I… don't know," he mumbled. "I've never seen my, um, bicep or triceps or whatever that is before." Another lie; he'd suffered far worse. "Maybe it's because- no, never mind."
Sam shot him a filthy glare. You'd better know what you're doing.
The A-listers' curiosity was piqued. "Why do you think you're like that?" demanded Dash.
Danny hung his head, feigning shame. "When I was little," he mumbled reluctantly, "Mom and Dad used to experiment on me. Nothing bad or anything," he added quickly, staving off their horrified gasps, "just little things like gargling ectoplasm to see if I thought it was alkaline or saline." Technically, this was true. Jack had made him gargle ectoplasm, but that wasn't the reason for his bizarre physiology.
"Nothing bad or anything?" Valerie repeated incredulously. "Danny, that's child abuse! They could be arrested for that!"
"No wonder you're so freaky," Paullina muttered under her breath. Danny pretended not to hear.
Sam nodded slowly, shot him a smile. Good job. I didn't think you could get out of that.
"I don't want to talk about it, okay? Let's just get going."
They were silent for a while before Star, in a wildly transparent attempt to ease the tension, began pointing out weird things in the sky. Funnily enough, her exuberance only made the strain more poignant. The other girls occasionally made a grunt of agreement to their classmate's observations. Eventually, Star fell silent.
Dash hadn't spoken a word since Danny's revelation. His own parents were pretty distant and not very nice, but they'd never experimented on him. What would it have been like if they had?
Empathy and sympathy were uncommon emotions for the blond jock, and he didn't like them at all. Yet that was exactly what he felt: empathy and sympathy. The quarterback silently vowed never to pick on Fenton again. It was the least he could do, assuming they got out of this alive.
And speaking of picking on Fenton… how was it that the smaller boy could take on six-foot ghost monsters barehanded and win? In school, he was famous for being wimpy. Danny Fenton never fought back, never complained. He was slow and clumsy with no fighting skills to speak of. He'd almost failed gym two years in a row. Yet here in the Ghost Zone, he'd walked for hours on bare feet without complaint, fought two ghosts and won, and then shrugged everything off as though it were no big deal.
Then a horrible thought occurred to him. Since he had handled the robot ghost with such skill, Fenton obviously could have beaten Dash, Kwan, probably half the football team with no effort at all. But he didn't.
Why not?
He was so absorbed that he didn't even notice when they stopped. Danny actually had to chase the jock down and bring him back before announcing that he and Sam were going to look for more banana-pears.
Less than two minutes after their departure, a green swirly thing opened right in front of them. Star, who had been stretching her aching calves, jerked away from it. Unfortunately, her back foot landed on the very edge of the rocky path. Another inch and she would have fallen off entirely. Arms pinwheeling in a futile attempt to regain her balance, her body rocking back and forth, the popular girl leaned forward. With a scream of terror, she fell into the portal.
Oh no! Star is in a portal. Unless you've read the original by shamrock17, you have no way of knowing what happened to her!
Other news: My next update for Kith and Kin and this fic should be sometime next week. I'm not sure about Alphabet Soup. It's not exactly high priority at the moment. -Corona