Kwan watched impassively as another chunk of their island drifted off into the invisible currents of the Ghost Zone. A grinning Danny Phantom appeared from down below, floating through the island until he would no longer die if he suddenly lost control of his intangibility, merging his organs with rock. Or something else nasty happened, like a nuclear explosion since atoms were split all of a sudden. Kwan didn't like to think about that.

"That's the last of it," Danny announced. "The engine is ready, I've carved up half the island to make it lighter, we've got enough ectoplasm to power it for four days... I'd say we're ready to go!"

Kwan looked behind him at the mess of cables leading from the station to the two propellers propped on their metal struts, balancing on the edge of the island. The transformer they'd secured with so much trouble wasn't even visible from this vantage point, hidden away near the ecto-converter situated inside the space station. They'd welded the tankards to a contraption in order for them to tip over every fifteen minutes to deposit some ectoplasm in the appropriate funnel of the ecto-converter. It was an engine alright, if you looked at it from afar and had no technical knowledge whatsoever. But Kwan knew it'd get them home anyhow.

"We just have one more problem," said Kwan. Danny hovered a bit lower, his thick eyebrows announcing the quizzical look on his face. "We don't know which direction to go in," finished Kwan.

Danny shrugged and pointed at the giant swirling mass of ectoplasm in the distance. "I know we need to stay away from there, but as for the rest... Pick a direction, any direction, and we'll just have to try and ask a ghost along the way."

Kwan turned around in a complete circle before he pointed at some green fog obscuring part of the scenery. "That way," he said.

"Sure, why not. Gentlemen... start. Your. Engines! Or the propellers, but that doesn't sound as good, does it?" Danny's grin was sincere and happy and Kwan couldn't help but grin back as he headed back inside the turn the whole thing on. This only took the push of a button, so he was back outside in twenty seconds. The propellers made a strange noise as they powered up and it took Kwan some seconds to realize what was so alien about the noise they generated. It was the sound of wind, inside the windless Ghost Zone. It seemed out of place.

A small tremor shook through the island but then it actually began to move, slowly. It picked up speed as the tankards tipped over for the first time, depositing the necessary ectoplasm in the ecto-converter.

Danny whooped and circled the island three times, zipping around easily, his exhaustion and wounds from the fight inside the bank already halfway to healed. It had taken them five hours to assemble the entire rig and Kwan had used a break to change clothes and have another sponge bath, which put him in better spirits too. And the fact that they had actually done it added happiness to his emotions as well.

Watch out NASA, here come the Ghostzonenauts.

XXX

"To the left! Left!"

"I'm pushing already!"

Too slow their island drifted to the left, but the majority of it still headed for an impact with another floating island. That was the trouble with an engine that could only go forward: the steering had to be done manually by pushing the island left or right. Danny had insisted that he had enough power to do that, but the imminent collision told the truth.

"LEFT!" yelled Kwan in vain, bracing for impact. With an almighty grunt Danny gave the island one last shove and turned intangible before he got crushed between the two masses of rock. With an almighty crunch the islands collided, but the last shove had had enough power behind it to only scrape the island, instead of crashing head-on. The whole island trembled as the shock wave traveled through and Kwan fell to his knees, hoping at the same time that their severely structurally... re-imagined island wouldn't crumble apart. But the tremors subsided and the island was still whole, so unless cracks appeared on the surface, they were okay. Hopefully.

Kwan cast around for Danny and found the half-ghost standing on the other island, his green eyes flitting left and right, also searching for any cracks on the surface. Both his arms trembled from the strain he had put upon them and sweat drops coated his brow. When he saw Kwan's look he gave a thumbs-up.

"Looks alright!" he called and positioned himself on the edge of their island again, pushing them apart. When they were back on course Danny sat down heavily on the grass at the edge, his legs dangling over the nothingness of the Ghost Zone. Kwan joined him there, offering a bottle of water. Danny emptied it within seconds and looked at his trembling hands.

"Now I know how the Titanic could've sunk. That island came out of nowhere!"

"At least half of it wasn't underwater, but yeah, we need a radar."

The whirl of propellers and the nearly imperceptible hum of the ecto-converter were the only sounds they heard for a while. Slowly the trembling in Danny's hands subsided. He brought his knees to his chest and rested his chin on them, eyes turned to the front of the island to make sure they wouldn't crash into another island or a ghost's lair again.

"At least that means we're making progress," said Kwan. Danny jumped a bit as if he suddenly remembered he wasn't alone on this island.

"Yeah, but I still don't recognize any of it. We could be going in completely the wrong direction."

Kwan shrugged. "We were originally 230 miles from Earth, a few miles in the wrong direction is no big deal. I wonder how fast we're moving anyway."

Danny gave him a sideways look Kwan recognized as his 'you've got a puzzle piece but don't know which puzzle it's from' look. It was a fairly specific look. "Distance doesn't quite work the way in the Ghost Zone as it does on Earth," he said. "The Ghost Zone itself is hard to navigate around in. There are some spots which are fixed, but the distance between them changes. Ghosts live off emotions, like you know. The Ghost Zone itself is … well, I'm not sure yet, but I think it's an emotional construct. The distance varies because of the emotions you feel when you're traveling through it. A human mind can shape the Ghost Zone in new ways, and it stays that way until another human passes through."

"So if we're in a hurry, we can tell the surroundings to shrink?" Kwan theorized. Danny shook his head, hampered by his own knees.

"No, I'm afraid not. You can't ask it nicely to change for you. It has to feel the emotion before it changes. I haven't worked out what emotions shape the distances. Mostly because I'm either angry, afraid or sad when I'm here. Ten years ago or so, when we were chasing Vlad through the Ghost Zone, we ended up near Jupiter within minutes."

"But you were angry at that time, I presume."

Danny nodded. "Yes, I was. But it still got us to that planet so fast... One time I was elated though, and traveling sure seemed to go a lot faster. Like when you go somewhere new, it seems like a really long time to get there. But when you drive back, you're back home in no time at all. I'm still not sure if that was what happened, or if the Ghost Zone had somehow shrunk a bit to help me."

"That'd be useful," thought Kwan out loud. "If we accidentally go in the wrong direction, it won't matter much since distance is relative. So we just have to be happy?"

"I doubt that fake happiness is going to cut it. We could try laughing a lot."

"It's worth a shot. Know any good jokes?"

XXX

The voices from the ghosts outside still traveled through the open door of the space station, although the words were muffled enough Kwan couldn't really understand what they were saying. Quite annoying, since Danny was attempting to get directions from them. And Kwan had no idea how good Danny was at remembering directions, since above all he was a guy, and they tended to never ask for directions. Kwan had a vision of Danny in his Phantom body being lost in Amity Park and just flying on until he spotted a familiar landmark. Because finding your way around town wasn't hard from ground level, but there were no helpful signs in mid-air. Kwan sometimes had trouble even identifying what country the station flew over, let alone navigate a fairly large city like Amity Park with pinpoint precision. He thought he'd once spotted Amity Park at night, but it had shifted from the viewing window too quickly to identify.

Kwan gingerly walked across the floor, heading for the Destiny lab. Three days had passed by now since the beginning of this whole situation and the experiments on board the station had most likely failed by now. They'd commandeered the ecto-convertor for their engine and the ectoplasm samples were contaminated by the Ghost Zone ectoplasm. Kwan had been trained to deal with the other experiments, but he hadn't yet taken the time to check up on them since they had landed in the Ghost Zone. Now that he had to hide inside the station until Danny was done visiting the nearby ghost lairs, he had some time (and an incentive to stay inside, since the presence of a human they could feed on would only serve as a distraction). If ghosts ever got organized they could start a battery farm with humans serving as emotional food. And then they could go on to enslave humankind and create a virtual reality world where the humans thought they lived, until one savior would turn up-

His rampant thoughts got interrupted when he arrived at the lab and saw the state of it. Green coated the walls, the ceiling and the floor. A drop slid down the ceiling, hovered in mid-air and then decided to slam into the right wall, where it rejoined its siblings.

"Well... The experiments are ruined," Kwan said out loud. The landing couldn't have been soft on the module, but the amount of ectoplasm covering the inside was extraordinary. It was as if somebody had set off some C4 inside a paint jar. But that wasn't the worst part. The ectoplasm crawled along the walls, blindly floating left and right and up and down, no doubt looking for an exit. Kwan suddenly itched all over as he watched the usually inert liquid coming alive and crawling around. He imagined it sliding along underneath his skin and absentmindedly scratched the back of his hand.

He had theorized that ectoplasm itself was alive, but seeing it in action was another thing. Something inside the Ghost Zone had to activate the ectoplasm somehow, because on Earth it was just a liquid with unusual characteristics, but at least it didn't flip across the room like a blind spider.

Kwan shook himself and tried to look at the sight in a different way. What experiments could he still salvage? He brushed aside a few drops and set to work.

Half an hour later a cold feeling wafted over his back and he readied the laptop he held in case it was an unfamiliar ghost creeping up on him. But it was only Danny, phasing through the wall. He opened his mouth to say something, took in the state of the laboratory and closed it again.

"I think our experiment is ruined," he finally said. Kwan placed the laptop on the salvageable pile before he answered.

"I think a lot of experiments are ruined. So far I've been able to save most of the electronics, but the jumping spider is a bust."

"Why's that?" Danny asked. He kept hovering above the floor, drifting further into the laboratory. For a moment Kwan imagined himself in outer space again, the weightlessness making sure he never knew what the ceiling and what the floor was. Now he doubted he would ever forget that.

"The cage burst and she has escaped."

"Pity, I liked Nefertiti. But I've got good news!" Danny jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "One of those ghosts outside knew which direction to take to get to Pandora's lair. She's a friendly ghost, and I know the way home from that spot!"

"Great! Let's fire up the engine and go!" said Kwan with a huge smile. "Did they also know how long it'd take us to get there? Roughly?"

Danny shrugged. "I didn't ask." At a look from Kwan he held his hands wide in a 'what are you going to do' gesture. "Sorry, he bearly spoke English." Kwan waited a few seconds. Danny lowered his hands. "The ghost was a bear," he elaborated in a flat tone. "But he did help us get our bearings! No? Well, that was embearassing." Kwan groaned and Danny grinned. "I'll fire up the engine, you go on with your grizzly task."

The half-ghost fled through the wall but before Kwan could resume his task Danny's intangible head popped back in. "Be back in a jiffy, honey!"

"I'm so glad I'm not on Team Phantom!" Kwan yelled after him, for once in his life meaning it. He never quite understood how a dark girl like Samantha Manson could find a guy who used puns in everyday life attractive. Danny might be one of the strongest people in the world, at heart he would forever be a complete and utter dork.

XXX

The engine held up remarkably well for something so cobbled together from different time periods. They had two more near-crashes with islands but they had gotten better at spotting them and diverting course. They were into the twelfth hour from the moment they knew where they were going. Well, Danny knew where they were going, everything still looked the same to Kwan. But it felt like they were making progress.

"Can't you tear a hole between the dimensions to see how far from Earth we are?" Kwan asked. For once Danny was in human form as he ate. Kwan could guess why, because Danny had startled him more than once in the previous two hours. Which meant that the half-ghost hungered for human fear, and Kwan's mind immediately plastered that sentence onto the cover of a cheap horror movie. Preferably something with a close-up of an eye and green blood splotches.

Danny swallowed before he answered. He waved his fork around to emphasize words. "I could, but it wouldn't be much use. The Ghost Zone shifts around all the time. The doors move, everything moves. The moment you step out, so to speak, the Ghost Zone keeps on going. So even if you turn around and immediately create a new portal, the Ghost Zone has moved. One portal could lead to Neptune, and a portal one yard to the left to the barn of a Russian farm."

Kwan chewed on his piece of broccoli for a while before he replied. "So the Ghost Zone is revolving around something?"

"I don't know yet," Danny answered truthfully and with a frown on his face. "So far nobody's been able to figure out what exactly the Ghost Zone is. Tuck thinks it's a nexus."

When Kwan gave him a blank look and stopped his broccoli halfway to his mouth Danny elaborated. "You never read many superhero comics, did you? Never mind," he waved the fork in a dismissive gesture, "you were on the A-list. A nexus is a world between worlds, a hub connecting all kinds of dimensions."

"So why is it moving around?"

Danny ran a hand through his hair in frustration, making it appear even bigger. "I don't know, Kwan. I just know that full ghosts can see leylines, and they shift around." The fork slashed left and right, showing an imaginary web of lines in mid-air. "My parents haven't been able to think of an invention to show them to us, so in the meantime it's trial and error about placing a portal. Hence the Infini-map's worth..."

The half-ghost shot up so fast the tray on his lap toppled over and the contents coated the purple grass. Kwan hoped that Danny wouldn't startle him so much again when he inevitably became hungry.

"Forget Pandora, we can go to Frostbite!" Danny exclaimed, turning to Kwan, his eyebrows doing a weird squiggly dance as if he'd just presented the solution to world peace. Kwan grew tired of looking quizzically at Danny these past days as they roamed unfamiliar terrain. It wasn't fair how much Danny knew about the Ghost Zone and how many times Kwan had to ask for elaboration. When all this was over Kwan planned on taking Danny to a football game and letting him ask all the questions for once.

"Who's Frostbite?" Kwan asked in an almost bored sounding tone. Danny should by now know not to throw names like that around. Enthusiastically Danny spun a tale about yeti creatures living in the Ghost Zone, possessing both advanced technology and remarkable powers but little in the way of entertainment.

"They taught me how to control my ice powers. Without them, well... I'd have died, probably," Danny finished his tale. His arms snaked around his forearms as if he was warming himself up. When he realized what his hands were doing he dropped them and sat back down. The prepackaged meal had gone to waste. Kwan realized that they should probably do an inventory of the remaining food. Their mission had been nearing its end after all, and right now they should have been training the new crew before heading back down to Earth. The new crew would have brought fresh food and other supplies. The ISS was kept well-stocked in case of an emergency, but if the Ghost Zone expanded around them or did some other impossible juggling with physics they would have to find a new food source.

"Land ho!" Danny suddenly yelled and blinded Kwan by transforming. He jumped over the edge and once more steered the island away from another collision. Kwan ran over to the station in case he had to cut power to the propellers, but Danny didn't give that signal yet. A few moments later their course changed and they gently drifted past the island. Danny clawed back onto their island and dropped heavily to the ground. Quite a feat for a being who could float without even noticing it, so that probably meant something was up.

As Kwan walked up to Danny a bright blue blast slammed into the ground inches from his left foot. He swung his body around to see who or what was gunning for him.

The ghost looked positively emaciated. His spectral form was transparent in places and the white glow ghost zone beings gave off was nearly invisible against the diffused light of this dimension. The ghost looked like he had died during the height of the disco rage but the platform shoes were no longer humorous once they were made from ectoplasm, Kwan decided.

"Human," it groaned, stretching out its arms towards the real world person. Kwan hastily took a few steps back as it readied another blast. He doubted that the blasts were that powerful going by the state of the ghost, but he still didn't want to risk any injuries.

"Danny?" Kwan asked, but the syllables had barely left his lips before Phantom barreled into the disco ghost. He bodily tackled him and they disappeared past the edge of the island. Kwan hurried back to the station to look for a weapon, any weapon at all. Even a length of wire with something heavy at the end would do as long as he had Danny as backup.

Two blue blasts shot upwards into the endless nothing of the Ghost Zone before an enormous green flash briefly illuminated the island. Danny's white hair appeared over the edge, drifting over the ground, spectral tail brushing the purple grass. He reformed his legs and pretty much threw himself to the ground. Even from a distance Kwan could see that Danny was tired, maybe even exhausted. Kwan abandoned his search for something weapon worthy and instead picked up a new prepackaged meal before heading to Danny's side. Danny transformed back into a human and Kwan hoped that was voluntarily, because as the disco ghost just showed they were still a prime target for wandering ghosts.

"Eat up," Kwan commanded. Danny took a second too long to look up and reply.

"M'not hungry," he muttered. Kwan pushed the tray onto his lap.

"Yes, you are," Kwan countered. "You scared me on purpose not an hour ago, which means that you're hungry. So eat up, because next time my fist might not miss your face."

Something in Kwan's tone got through to Danny because the half-ghost peeled the plastic back from the tray and laboriously began to eat. His hands still trembled slightly from the recent strain of changing course yet again and Kwan got an inkling what the drain of Danny's energy was.

In a human body there was only so much energy to go around before the body began shutting down. Sure, it could take weeks to die of a lack of energy, or rather, food, but it happened all too often around the world. But Kwan wondered how long Danny could actually go without food when he was active as Phantom. He used extraordinary amounts of power but didn't eat that much more than the average astronaut. Whether that was out of necessity to preserve food or because he truly wasn't hungry, Kwan didn't know, but he did have a sudden vision of Phantom hanging in the air, as see-through as that disco ghost.

"Are you sure that ghost is gone?" Kwan asked. Danny nodded, chewing his mouthful thoroughly before replying.

"I blasted it away, it should take a few days for it to reform its body," Danny said. "It's a bit of a violent solution, but without my Thermos it's the only solution we've got."

He played a bit with the food before he took another bite, chewing slowly. Kwan didn't leave him until he had polished off the tray. Danny's hands had stopped shaking and he didn't look as exhausted anymore. He even got up and transformed, body floating in the air two seconds after he'd changed. Hovering had to be a subconscious thing, Kwan decided.

"I'm taking another look around, see if I can spot anything familiar. Yell if another ghost comes at you," Danny said before speeding off. Kwan collected the trays and deposited them inside a waste storage device.

The Ghost Zone scenery slid by, one door after another, with barely any change in the huge swirls of green and black. The ecto-converter kept plugging away, but it still didn't feel like they had actually moved. His mind drifted back to the conversation about relative distance and he forced himself to think happy thoughts. His fiancée would welcome him back like a hero once they had made their way home. He was going to get married after all this was over, and he would be able to spend his whole life with her, smelly feet and inability to pronounce 'particularly' and all. That thought succeeded in bringing a smile to his face as he tried to spot the white glow of Danny Phantom circling the island.

Once they got home, they could get underway with repairing the space station and putting it back into proper orbit, albeit hopefully with a stronger engine to get it through the Ghost Zone this time. Danny could get that Infini-Map he was talking about, and in the end it would all work out fine. They had made it this far, it wouldn't be long before they got back to the portal now, he was sure of it. Or so he told himself.

Danny's white glow drifted into view. He was a lot further out than Kwan had realized and immediately he looked around, trying to see if any ghosts had decided to attack the human for his ability to give off fear and feed the ghost for a long time to come. But there were only doors, and the shape of a rather large island bobbing up and down in the distance. The floating island bobbed up and down a lot more than usual, but as long as nothing showed up to bump them off-course the island would float right past it.

On top of the island sat a white manor, looking out of place in the color scheme of three the Ghost Zone sported. It gave off a general feeling of man-made instead of ghost-made. Did ghosts even build buildings?

The white manor was elongated, a yellow-golden roof slanting sharply upward with sash windows dotting the front, a few bay windows in strategic places. There was superfluous decoration all over the house, from the gable dormers with three-leaf clovers inlaid in the stone to the varying pattern of bricks lending the illusion of length to the rectangle house.

As their floating island dutifully moved closer to the manor Kwan noticed what felt off about it. It didn't give off a glow like ghosts did. The structure obeyed the laws of physics of the real world and it looked like somebody had pasted it on the horizon, carrying all the wrong angles and smells. The soft smells of dirt, grass, cat hair and brick combined with the chemical smells of fresh paint and cleaning solution wafted from it as if Kwan stood inside the lobby instead of at a distance. Most of all it was the smell that marked this building as one from the real world, somehow lost inside this dimension. Had it fallen through a rift? The style of the manor looked old but the stone carried the sheen of wet paint. Maybe the freshness of it had been preserved by the vacuum of the Ghost Zone, where only ectoplasmic bacteria roamed, and the manor was really from the Victorian era.

The islands drifted closer together and Danny made his way back to the station, a frown on his face.

"I'm not sure, but I've seen that manor before." Before Kwan could say something Danny took off towards it, only to smack face-first into a solid green bubble. A ghost shield, emanating from the tip of the archway leading to the front door of the manor. It covered the entire island. Once Danny peeled himself off the ghost shield it faded away. Definitely a real world house then.

The islands were now only three hundred feet apart and now Kwan saw that although the house was built in the style of the Victorian era, it most certainly was a modern house. A tarmac driveway got cut off at the edge of the island and the porch light was electric. The bug zapper half-hidden underneath a bay window sealed the deal. This house was modern.

A high-pitched sound, more felt than heard, pierced through the remaining distance and a black mobility scooter hummed into view. The white-haired creature appeared human, also lacking the supernatural glow of ectoplasmic entities, much like his house. He appeared unsurprised at the appearance of a space station on his doorstep.

The man just rolled his scooter closer and a leisurely smile made its way onto his face.

"Hello, Daniel."

A/N: Entering the final phase of this story. Also: real life happened, causing the delay in posting. But I'm back and finishing this fic for sure.