Still don't own Danny Phantom.
-Crow
Chapter 6
The next day, Danny arrived to school and started looking around for Sam and Tucker.
He was walking along the locker banks when he suddenly felt a hand on the back of his shoulder. Before he could process it, he was suddenly slammed against the lockers with a CLANG! He blinked daze out of his eyes before focusing on the figure in front of him.
He had close-cropped blonde hair, a Casper High football jacket, and a ridiculously top-heavy build that left Danny wondering how he managed to stay upright with so much upper-body muscle mass being supported on little stick-legs.
Said figure sneered at him. "So, you're the new meat. Some wimpy geek like that emo chick and tech nerd you hang out with."
"Hey!" Said a familiar, female voice from the crowd. Sam Manson started pushing her way through the gathering spectators. "I resent that. I'm Goth, not emo."
The jock rolled his eyes. "Whatever, Manson. So, new kid, this is how it works around here. You're the bottom of the barrel and I'm what's called an "A-Lister". We're pretty much the top dogs of the school. So when I say "jump" you say "how high", got it?"
Danny didn't have time to respond before he was shoved into a nearby locker. Despite protesting from people around him, the jock spun the dial and left as the bell rang.
Danny heard his Goth friend calling his name through the locker slats and mentioned finding the janitor. Danny heard her walk away before phasing his invisible head through the locker. With no one looking, he phased the rest of himself out. Sam came back with a mustached old man with a mop and a ring of keys.
"Wait, Danny, how'd you get out?"
"Oh, well, I guess Dash didn't close it as well as he thought. I just pushed against the locker and it opened up. I actually just closed it out of habit, though." Danny was actually slightly impressed he was getting better at this whole "lying" thing.
Sam nodded before walking with him to Lancer's.
"So, you've met Dash." She said.
"Yeah, what's up with him?"
"I think it's some superiority complex. He's part of this group that calls themselves the A-listers. They're comprised of the "cool" kids; the rich, the jocks, the poster-perfect-models, and the wannabes who've sucked up enough to get there."
Danny nodded. He'd met Poindexter and heard plenty of rants about the nuisances of bullies and the "popular kids".
They kept chatting as until they reached Lancer's class in time for the bell.
Frank the Janitor was left back at the locker the kid was shoved into. He just shook his head at the injustice of it.
As a janitor, he didn't really have much say in anything that happened in the school and knew that Principal Ishiyama would favor her son's friend and the star athlete of the school along with the rest of the faculty. The kid needed a serious reality check that the world did not revolve around him and life didn't offer everything on a silver platter.
He walked up to the locker and examined the door. His eyebrows knitted together as he looked closer at the lock.
The locking mechanism was completely broken. Not just that, but it was broken in a way that it would take a lot of force to open it back up again. He guessed it was from that Baxter kid slamming it shut.
But that raised the question.
How did that kid get out?
Frank looked at the couple walking away towards their next class.
Either that Danny kid could walk through walls or he was one heck of an escape artist.
Aside from that unpleasant episode in the morning, Danny had to say that the day was going pretty well in his opinion.
After school, he met the Goth and the beret-wearing techie at the front lawn of the building.
"Hey, dude, we were going to the arcade. Did you want to come?" Tucker offered. Danny immediately accepted and followed them to a newer building on the other side of town.
The place was huge. A lot bigger than the one Danny remembered. What's more, he looked around at the bright, flashing lights of the environment and the loud sounds and screens. He froze in awe at the massive amount of technology.
"Hey, man, are you alright?" Tucker asked. Danny nodded quickly.
"Yeah… just… Wow!" He managed.
Tucker raised an eyebrow. "Wait, don't they have arcades up in Canada?"
Danny smiled. "Nothing like this!"
Sam came over with a few bags of quarters and they went all out. Danny quickly learned the basics of the racing games and Skii-ball. He was a bit uncomfortable with the House of the Dead IV game. After all, technically he was dead.
They explored the entire arcade until they came to the back corner of the place. There was an old-fashioned arcade machine there with a large, modern TV hooked up above it displaying what was on the old machine.
"What's the deal with this thing?" Danny asked.
"It's Guardian." Tucker explained. "This arcade used to be on Krueger before they moved it here. This game was leftover from the old location. It's one of the hardest games ever designed."
"Why'd they keep it?" Danny asked.
"It's a challenge. The leaderboard is sort of an exclusive place in here. They get free access to the games here along with two other people as long as their score is on the board. The last person to get on it was in the tenth place slot almost a decade ago. No one's gotten close to the number one spot in a long time."
"Who got the number one spot?"
"It's a legend, man!" The trio were startled by the sudden appearance of one of the pasty, pimply employees. He ignored their surprise and went on. "There was one boy with enough skill and courage to make it to the top. He fought valiantly and in the end discovered a long-lost secret in the game by pure chance. With this in hand, he acquired the legendary top position."
"Then what?" Danny asked, unnerved by the weird story-telling employee.
"He vanished. He was never seen from again and legend has it that he was too much for this world and ascended to the realm of the video game Gods! The secret has been lost through time and not even those who saw it could tell you exactly what he did.
"Some say that his hand was pure luck, others say fate, still others say that he became one with the machine in that instant. That was all the way back in the renowned year of nineteen hundred and two after eight decades."
"You mean 1982?" Danny clarified.
"Yeah, man. Sorry, I get kinda Dungeons and Dragons whenever it's brought up."
Danny nodded before looking down at his bag. He still had one quarter left and the game only took the one.
He walked up to the arcade game and put in his quarter. Within seconds, he was fighting hordes of demons on the screen. Sam and Tucker started cheering him on as they watched the large TV displaying the fight for the arcade to see.
Almost an hour later, Danny was still kicking butt on the machine. By now, he'd gathered a majority of the arcade's clients who'd formed a betting pool around him and were cheering him on.
He'd just gotten to a certain point. He was nowhere near the leaderboard scores, but he was pretty far up for someone on his first try.
He heard everyone else behind him, completely ignoring the "wakawakawaka" of the PacMan and the *ding* from the Pinball machines. This game was only just released a week before and he was already almost at 10,000 points. Almost enough to reach the pretty low-score leaderboard.
He saw an attack coming and had to react, he punched the figure before trying to fireball it. He accidentally hit the "start" button again, tried to avoid an attack by jumping and jerking to the right, followed by punching the ork to death and spin cycling into a nearby chest.
Everyone gasped as the chest opened-
Danny blinked. He was getting close to another room.
It had one ork and a chest on the side.
Well, what do I have to lose? He figured
Punch figure. Start. Jump. Right. Punch (death), spin-cycle chest.
The entire arcade went silent as the chest opened. The figure picked up the item inside and displayed it. It looked like Clockwork's staff if it was redesigned by Technus and the US military.
Everyone read the small text underneath.
'You got the Infinity Staff'
Danny walked the character out of the area and went to the next room to test it out.
One shot kill to every enemy.
"The legend" whispered the awestruck employee.
Over the next forty minutes Danny blasted through level after level. Every nerd had texted their friends. The arcade was packed with people all there to witness "the Legend".
Then, Danny got to a final room. In it was a boss with 1,000,000 HP and no shoot-the-big-eyeball target or obvious weak spot. For a full thirty minutes he slowly wore down the boss until it finally fell.
Everyone went into a hushed silence as the game read out: "You Won".
Pandemonium erupted when the fabled leaderboard popped up and at the very top, in the mystical first-place was a new slot awaiting Danny's code next to the 10,000,000 point record.
He punched in "Danny F." and hit enter. Everyone cheered (and a few sobbed) at the moment in Nerd-dom history. A few actually ordered pizza to the place with soda to commemorate the occasion.
Danny and Tucker eagerly walked over with the rest to the feast. Sam stayed behind. She smiled at Danny's reaction to the grape and orange-flavored sodas, but kept looking back at the old leaderboard.
Under the slot where Danny had punched in his name was the original first-place holder from 1982.
"Danny F."
After the celebration at the arcade, the trio went back out to town, Tucker still fan-guying over Danny.
"Oh, man. You gotta teach me that Easter egg! How did you get it? Please? Please?" He begged.
Danny smirked. "Sorry Tuck, I'm not even sure what happened." He took on an unfocused look and mumbled. "It was like the game called to me. I felt like I was one with the machine."
Tucker had been fantasizing about cyborgs and human-machine symbiosis since he first picked up a phone. He completely missed the sarcasm in Danny's response and now held a sort of reverence to the thought.
Danny didn't feel too guilty about it. After all, if he did tell Tucker, then everyone would know the secret and the leaderboard would be useless. As it was, he'd already bagged free games for pretty much eternity for the trio (given how long it took anyone to get even 10th place).
The three went into the Amity Park Bakery. Each ordered a cinnamon bun and Sam ordered an organic black tea with hers. Danny took a bite out of the cinnamon bun.
He looked at his family as he munched on the bun. These were definitely the best in town. It always cheered him up.
On bad days…
He would wish he had a cinnamon bun from the bakery on Krueger Street.
He jolted in his seat.
"What's up, Danny?" Sam asked.
"It's nothing. This was just a really good cinnamon bun."
Danny finished his bun relatively quickly and took the wrapper the bun came in and fiddled with it. Sam was busy sipping her tea and looking pensively out the window. Tucker was tapping away on his 'PDA'.
"Hey, Danny, you know origami?" Sam asked.
Danny was confused before he looked down. His wrapper had become a small, paper flower. He was startled at the subconscious act. "I guess so."
Sam soon finished her mug and they all went up to throw away their garbage. Danny, however, felt compelled to take the paper flower and put it on top of the register. Neither of the other two questioned it; they thought it looked pretty good.
They left the restaurant and said goodbye as they left for their own separate homes.
Agatha Gray had been in the bakery since she got it from her parents. She always loved baking so she'd been helping in the shop since she was five years old back in 1958.
The old lady was fond of still walking around the bakery, helping in small ways even though she was officially "retired". Whenever she wasn't at the bakery, she'd usually meet up with Ida Manson and chat.
She was considered a bit eccentric by her family. She had a small collection of small, paper flowers that never left her bedroom. She'd had them since any of them could remember and would never throw any of them away.
She told the story to her granddaughter, though. The grandmother was losing heart when the bakery wasn't doing too well back in the late 70's. Then, a young boy (around 8 or 9 at the time) showed his appreciation by making small flowers out of the paper from the cinnamon buns he was so fond of.
He would give one to her every time he visited, leaving it perched on the register. Eventually, her business bounced back, but she never got his name and forgot to ask every time he'd come over. After some time, his visits stopped abruptly and she never heard or saw him again.
The old woman walked around the restaurant around closing time that night. Watching some teenagers and a young couple heading out for the night. She turned to the counter to clean up.
She paused and picked up the small, paper flower made from the wrapper of a pastry. She took a sniff of the wrapper.
Cinnamon and sugar.
She smiled warmly at the small present and added it to her small collection upstairs.
Wait until Ida hears about this one. She thought.
AN: I love the warm, cozy ghost stories like this. Not to say I don't completely love the scary ones (I really do), but every now and then a story like this where the grandmother gets an origami figure from the grandson who died just warms my chest cavity (a running joke in the family. Chest cavity because "I have no heart". Lol).
To everyone out there, thanks to your comments I realized something; Danny Phantom wouldn't be the same without his main thing: Fighting Ghosts. I said earlier I wouldn't have too many ghostly enemies, but I think I've found a way for him to fight his ghostly friends as they cause mayhem and for it to work out without compromising the secret or his family's portal. I'm always open to suggestions from you. This is pretty much unknown territory for me and I want to make it progress without using too much fluff and making it too deviated from the original Danny Phantom premise. Any help, criticism, suggestions, or comments/reviews are welcome!
I hope you enjoyed this chapter!Until next time!
-Crow