Danny flew through the roof of his home, turning tangible once he had fully emerged.

He looked around and immediately saw the ghost that had triggered his ghost sense. A ghost who looked simply like a giant ectoplasmic booger glided along the street, roaring at the cars in the street.

People were exiting their cars, leaving in them in the middle of the street, and running away from the living blob of ectoplasm. Pedestrians screamed, and mothers held their babies close to their chests.

"Look!" a young boy yelled. He pointed to where Danny was floating, an excited look on his face. "It's Danny Phantom!"

The bystanders cheered, relieved that their hero had arrived to take care of the the ghostly beast that had made it's way into the street. Danny smiled and gave the crowd a quick wave before flying toward to disgusting monster.

"Hey, Ugly! Over here!" Danny cried. The ghost turned around to face Danny, and snarled when he saw the ghost boy slotting oh-so-arrogantly next to him.

Danny, having battled this particular ghost many times, and having won each of those battles quite easily, felt confident. He punched the monster in the area of goop that resembled a face, and the monster howled. The howl then turned into a roar, and he swat at Danny.

"Hey!" Danny said. He quickly flew out of the way, narrowly avoiding being slapped by the ghost.

Danny shot a few ectoplasmic rays at the at the slimy, green ghost. Each time the ghost was hit by a ray, he cringed and howled, and took another swat at Danny. In Danny's experience, he had learned that the mountains of living ectoplasm looked quite scary, but were rather terrible fighters. The first time Danny fought one of the creatures, he had been quite overwhelmed by its size, but ended up beating it in less time than it took him to beat a lone ectopus.

The ectoplasmic rays seemed to only be making the beast agitated, not weaker. Deciding he needed to finish this up quickly so that people could resume using the street, Danny fired an ice ray, freezing the creature in its tracks.

The creature, while a terrible fighter, was admittedly rather strong, so Danny moved quickly, not wanting the creature to break through the ice, which would be quite easy on the hot summer day that it was.

"Say goodbye, Gruesome," Danny said with a cocky smile. He whipped out a Fenton thermos and sucked the monster into it. He quickly scanned the street, and when he saw the rather disgusting trail of slime the monster had left, he aimed his thermos at it, sucking it into the thermos as well.

He capped the thermos and smiled as the spectators on either side of the street began to cheer. "You're my hero!" many of the younger children called up to him. He smiled, waved, then flew higher up into the air, went invisible, then intangible, then flew through the roof of his house.

Once inside, Danny turned back to human, then strolled into the lab. His parents were still in their, bent over a table the contained various tools and materials, as well as notes, blue prints, and test tubes of ectoplasm.

"I'm back," Danny announced. His parents both greeted him, and he then walked to the ghost portal. He emptied the thermos's content into the Ghost Zone. He hadn't emptied it in a while, and he figured that after sucking that huge mountain of a ghost into the thermos, it had to have been full or almost full. And the last thing he needed was to be in the middle of a fight, attempt to use the thermos, and have it fail him.

He emptied the thermos, watching a variety of ghosts pour back into the Ghost Zone. He rolled his eyes when Skulker, without his suit, entered the green swirling mass, shouting, "You have not seen the last of me, ghost child!"

"That's what you say every time," Danny mumbled.

ooo

The doorbell rang and Danny sped downstairs to answer it. Sam and Tucker were coming over to help him train. Every so often the trio would meet at Danny's house and use the lab to train Danny so he could improve his powers. Usually they scheduled it for a time when Danny's parents would be out so they wouldn't walk in on them while he was still in ghost form. Now, though, Danny's parents knew about his powers, and he had even told them about the training.

Danny opened the door to find Sam and Tucker on the other side. Sam had a backpack slung over her shoulder, and Tucker held his PDA firmly in his hands.

"Ready to work your butt off?" Sam said.

The trio made their way downstairs to the lab. Immediately, Sam and Tucker began setting things up. They emptied Sam's backpack which contained a speed gun, the remote that controlled the training gear and courses Tucker had set up when they first started training, a manilla folder crammed with notes and statistics about Danny's powers, and a clipboard that had a thick pile of identical check lists attached.

The check lists listed each of Danny's powers. Each power had a square for a check mark, as well as a few blank lines for any notes. Sam had typed up the lists when they had first started training, and she had printed multiple copies. She did, however, have to alter the lists a few times when Danny gained a new power.

"Ready?" Tucker asked once they had everything ready.

Danny smiled and transformed. Black hair became white, blue eyes became green, the everyday outfit Danny wore changed into a jumpsuit with the famous insignia imprinted on the chest. "Ready," Danny confirmed.

ooo

Maddie sat on the couch in her living room, a novel in her hands. She usually enjoyed reading, but her mind kept drifting, and she found herself having to read the same paragraph over various times because she hadn't paid attention the first time she read it.

Giving up on reading for the moment, she placed a scrap of paper in the book to mark what page she had left off on, and looked at her daughter who sat across from her in an over stuffed arm chair.

Jazz sat with her legs criss cross in the chair, a psychology textbook balancing on her lap. She chewed on the eraser of a pencil as her eyes scanned the text. Every so often she would stumble across a key concept, and she would jot it down in the notebook that rested on the arm of her chair.

It had been quiet for a while, which was unusual in the Fenton household, but Jazz greatly appreciated it. It was usually a frustrating process to get homework done at her house what with her parents always working on their inventions, and her brother's too-loud video games. But today, it was quiet. Jack had stayed up all night working on a new invention, and decided to take a nap about a half hour ago. Danny's friends had come over and were down in the basement training which, surprisingly, wasn't as loud as Danny's video games were. Since Danny was using the lab, and Maddie didn't want to work on and inventions on the ground floor so as not to wake Jack, she had sat down with a novel.

Jazz had accepted this quiet with open arms, and took advantage of it to work on the weekend homework she had assigned herself. She had checked out a rather advanced book on psychology, and had promised herself that by the end of the weekend, she would have it read through, as well as notes written about each key concept in the book.

Jazz was rather focused on her self-assigned homework, but she still heard Maddie ask her, "Have you ever seen them train?"

Jazz looked up from her book and toward Maddie. "What?" she asked.

"Have you ever seen them train?" Maddie repeated. "Danny, Sam, and Tucker. Down in the lab."

"No," Jazz said, shaking her head. "I've known Danny's secret for a while, but I haven't exactly helped with the actual ghost fighting. I mostly just covered for him when he had to leave school, or miss dinner to deal with a ghost."

Maddie nodded. "How come you don't help with the actual fighting?" she asked. She had known her son's secret for nearly a week now, but there was still so much she didn't know.

Jazz shrugged. "It's not really my thing. I tried to help, when I first found out, but I ended up just getting in the way. I let three ghosts get away, let one evil ghost steal the ecto-covertor you and Dad had hooked up to the RV, and accidentally sucked Danny into a Fenton thermos."

"You trapped your brother in the Fenton thermos?" Maddie repeated through her peels of laughter.

"It wasn't my fault!" Jazz said defensively. "I slipped. I felt really bad, though. He was crammed in that thing for about six hours." Maddie laughed even harder.

Jazz scrunched her eyebrows together as Maddie laughed. "I'm sorry," Maddie said when her laughter died down and she saw the annoyed look on Jazz's face. "It's just so funny."

The two were quiet for a while and Jazz returned to her psychology book. She had only read a couple paragraphs, however, when Maddie said, "So, do you know what they do when they train?"

"No," Jazz said, scribbling something down in her notebook. "If you're so curious, why don't you just go down there and watch?" she suggested.

"You don't think they'll mind?" Maddie said warily. She could tell her son was still rather uncomfortable transforming and using his powers around her and Jack. She couldn't blame him, though. She was still slightly uncomfortable seeing Danny use his powers. His transformations were always odd to watch; Seeing her son turn into the town's hero was still foreign to her. And it was quite strange seeing her son use his powers so… Naturally. It especially made her wonder when she noticed her shy and awkward Danny become arrogant and witty when he changed into his ghost form.

Jazz shrugged. "I don't know. If you think he will, though, just stand at the bottom of the stairs and watch. I doubt they'll see you."

Maddie decided to take her daughter's advice and walked to down the stairs that led to the lab, stopping on the last one. She smiled when she saw her son, in ghost form, floating eight feet in the air.

"Okay, hot-shot," Sam said to Danny. "Let's ramp it up." She pushed a button on the remote she held in her hands. Rings came down from the ceiling, and dart guns popped out from the walls. Maddie's eyebrows rose. Have they built this all by their selves? she wondered. She and Jack hadn't built any part of the obstacle course that lay before her.

Danny responded to the obstacles immediately. He grabbed onto one of the rings and swung himself through, sent himself flying through the next one. He grabbed the rim of the third ring and flipped through it, then sailed through the last circle.

Next came the dart guns. Maddie watched intently as her son dodged the rounds of dart fired at him. He flew out of the way of most of the groups of darts, narrowly avoiding some. Maddie's eyes widened as a rather large, final group of darts flew toward Danny's back. He turned around, and turned himself intangible just before the darts hit him.

Tucker took the remote from Sam and hit another button. Metal rods with cardboard cutouts of ghosts attached to them jutted out of the ground. Maddie smiled and rolled her eyes slightly when another cardboard cutout popped out of the ground, this one designed to look like an angry Jazz rather than a ghost.

Danny blasted ectoplasmic rays and ice rays at each one of the ghost cutouts, skipping over the Jazz cutout. Then, with a shrug and a devilish smile, Danny shot another ecto-ray at the Jazz cutout. This made Maddie giggle, but she kept quiet, not wanting to disturb the trio's process.

Next, metal walls emerged from the ground. Danny flew down to their level, the floated intangibly through each one, backwards, and with his hands behind his head and legs crossed, as if he was relaxing on a lounge chair.

After floating through the last metal barrier, he went tangible once more and gave Tucker and Sam a thumbs up and a rather haughty smile. But, as he smiled at them, he was still floating backwards. He crashed into the wall of the lab and fell rather unceremoniously to the ground. At this, Maddie burst out laughing.

All three heads turned toward her. "Mom?" Danny asked. "What are you doing down here?"

Maddie shrugged slightly with one shoulder and said, "I was curious." She paused then looked around at the obstacles throughout the room. "Did you three build this yourselves?"

Sam nodded. "We kind of, er, borrowed some of your equipment and materials you had in the lab." Maddie nodded and looked at the dart guns still protruding from the wall. There was and incident last year when Jack had claimed to have finished twelve working dart guns, all of which mysteriously disappeared the next day.

"Danny and I did most of the actual constructing, but the wiring and technology aspect was all Tucker. He synced the things to a remote so we could hide all this stuff. It would be kind of weird if you and Mr. Fenton came down to the lab one day and suddenly an entire obstacle course dominated the room."

"It's impressive," Maddie said. "How long did it take you to build all this?"

Sam puckered her lips and tilted her head to the side. "I don't know," she said. "We kind of gradually added to it as the training became harder, and Danny became more skilled with his powers. When we first started, he couldn't even float through all the walls intangibly. He would accidentally turn tangible and slam into one of the walls."

"Hey!" Danny said. "That only happened four times."

"Yeah," Tucker agreed. "But you've slammed into that wall," he pointed to the wall of the lab Danny had crashed into after floating through the barriers, "about four hundred times."

Danny was about to retort when the misty blue breath that was his ghost sense floated out of his mouth. "I'll be right back," he said with a sigh.

"You want us to help you?" Sam asked.

Danny shook his head. "Nah, it's okay. I don't think it'll be anything too bad." And with that he flew out of the room.

While Danny was gone, Maddie asked Sam and Tucker a few more questions about Danny's training, as well as how the three of them patrolled. There was a comfortable atmosphere in the room as Sam and Tucker explained everything to Maddie.

But then, Danny flew back into the room. He had been gone no more than ten minutes, but there were scratches on his cheeks, and the shoulder of one of his sleeves had been burnt away revealing fleshy, bright red burnt skin.

"Guys," Danny said. "I actually do need your help. Jazz, too. And dad."