Okay, so this is actually a day later than the extremely late deadline I had planned, but we'll live because I had the excuse of being out of town… again. Anyway, I am now officially a year and a day old on this site! I have been writing for a year and three days now. Exciting, no?

OH MY CHEESE! Did you know there's supposedly a despair dot com? I didn't look it up so I'm not really sure if it's real, but I read it somewhere.

Disclaimer: A dream is a wish your heart makes. *Sigh* Not even in my dreams….

Danny, Dani, and Jazz had safely reached home about two hours after the initial ghost "attack" in the school. Usually, they could count on their parents' ability to spend at least four hours scouring the "infected" area before arriving.

As Danny's luck would have it, that wasn't the case this time.

As soon as the three teens set foot on the mercifully solid, concrete floor, a small shiver of cold ran through Dani's spine. She abruptly left the visible spectrum and leapt lithely into the air, barely avoiding being caught by the two humans that came rushing in seconds too late.

Danny started trying to explain why they were in the lab, but their parents blew right past them, keeping their noses firmly glued to the devices in their hands. Danny rolled his eyes and motioned for Jazz to follow him up the stairs.

They hadn't even made it to the first stair when Maddie yelled, "Ghost!" Her ghost-seeking device was held up, pointing, not at Danny, but at Dani.

"Come out of hiding, you suffering spook!" Jack yelled maliciously. The glint in his eye suggested he knew exactly what he was going to do with this manifestation of post-human consciousness, and it was not going to be pretty.

Dani, having inherited at least part of Vlad's intelligence, immediately zoomed through the wall, following the underground to the school.

Maddie's immediate response took Danny off guard.

She glared at the device in her hands then put it on the ground. A soft, blue glow occupied the space surrounding it. The light grew brighter as Danny backed away from it. Jazz followed, only slightly slower. She knew there wasn't much she had to worry about, but she had just been in the Ghost Zone.

As the light reached a small sample of ectoplasm hanging precariously on the edge of a lab table, it became a deep crimson, flashing green sporadically. Suddenly, the all-encompassing beam concentrated into a single laser that blasted the ectoplasm to smithereens, container and all.

Danny gulped.

"I'm, uh, gonna go… get some lunch, now…" he said hesitantly.

"Right behind you, little brother," Jazz muttered, visibly disturbed by the device still on the floor.

-_- annoying little cliffies, no? -_- annoying little line breaks even more so? -_-

Kyshor Reynolds was just an average Swahili-speaking, ecto-friendly janitor. At least, that's what he kept telling everyone, not that many people asked. He liked to believe that he could handle the goings-on of Amity even better than the people born there. The thing he didn't understand, though, was why Mr. Lancer, the second-weirdest of all teachers in Kyshor's eyes (topped only by that strange gym coach), was sitting on the floor in his classroom, puzzling over a piece of paper.

Maybe it's a teacher thing? His thoughts turned to other strange positions he'd seen from teachers of the past. Sitting on the floor definitely wasn't high on the "creepy" list, but it still reminded him oddly of how a child would sit to color. He gently knocked on the door. Weird guy or no, he had to empty the garbage. He suddenly shuddered at the thought of having to clear out the chemistry lab again. He had a nasty run-in with some sharp glass at the beginning of the last year. The cheap school refused to pay for recycling, not that many teens (or teachers, for that matter) would actually use it, so the teacher hadn't really known that sharp glass in a flimsy plastic bag would break, nor that the poor old janitor would be on the receiving end.

Lancer's eyes shot up, a panicked look quickly replaced with relief. Reynolds shrugged it off.

"Comin' to pick up trash," he said. "You got any?"

The man nodded tersely and gestured to the trashcan next to his desk. Reynolds sighed and forced his tired old legs forward. He dragged the large trash bin with him, squeaking slowly towards his destination.

When his task was complete, Reynolds noticed something was out of place. Where was the chair?

~-~ well, this chap is partly just a filler… ~-~

Dani was staring at a small boy in a large, red chair. Currently, said boy was twirling endlessly, prattling on and on about how this prank gave him the right to join the war effort. For all Dani cared, he could do anything he wanted. The only problem she had was that he seemed convinced it made him her teammate.

"Have you ever done anything like this before?" she asked. "There are no teams!"

"Oh," he said, unaffected. "So I can still be part of the prank war, right?"

She rolled her eyes. "For the last time, yes! If you don't do anything that threatens someone, I can't think of anything Danny would be able to say about it. Besides, I'm sure you'd break him down with your begging if he didn't let you. You're kind of annoying, you know that?"

The boy grinned. "You only think I'm kinda annoying? Most people threaten me when they say something about how annoying I am."

Dani giggled. "I can see that. Anyway, there are no rules for a prank war, so I guess we can team up for a few of them…" Her casual suggestion was instantly regretted as the boy's face lit up ecstatically.

"Great! That's awesome! Man, I can't wait to start."

Dani rolled her eyes and glared in mock disgust at the young boy. "Well, Youngblood, this is going to be a long war."

To The Ghost Writer's Apprentice, Phantom-Stelo, son of wind, He(ck)breaker (sorry, I consider that a cuss), Underworld Angel, DBack47, aslan333, Skye of the Night, Codiak, and all anonymous reviewers: Thank you so much for reviewing! They made me smile.

Frizzle (since I couldn't PM), I completely agree. The first few were intended to be a Lancer-revelation fic, but I got carried away… I know that pranks aren't very practical in his life, but… well, he's a teenager in dire need of stress relief. I never said it would be easy for him. (if you wanted to know, I'm smiling maliciously now) I don't like Dani that much either, but she's a frequent cliché and I wanted to write something a little… different from what others seem to think.