Chapter Eleven

"Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days."

- Benjamin Franklin


Danny stared hard at the glass, eyes tight. The water inside rippled, and stilled. Again it rippled, and again it stilled, like there was a T-Rex approaching Fentonworks. Then, it puckered at its center, and plucked, and-

"Danny, sweetie, are you okay?"

He jerked backward. "What? Huh?"

"You were staring into space," said his mother, and Danny realized everyone at the kitchen table was now looking at him. "Is there something bothering you?"

He shook his head, blinking hard. "No, nothing. I was, uh, thinking about a… math problem." Inside, he winced. That was definitely one of the lamest excuses he had ever come up with.

"Maybe one of us can help you with that?" suggested Mr. Masters, and Danny realized just how bad this excuse was, surrounded on all sides by genius scientists and one soon-to-be genius scientist.

"Thanks, but I forgot most of the numbers. I'm sure I can figure it out later." He blushed, and went back to eating. A second later, Mr. Masters picked up the glass Danny had been trying to knock over with the force of his mind and drained every last drop from it.

Darn it, he thought. Now what?

The entire day, and most of the night too, Danny hadn't been able to stop thinking about what he had seen. At first he thought he had been hallucinating, but when he'd gone down to the beach to look around, the evidence all pointed to something that should have been impossible. He had followed Mr. Masters's footprints through the sand, right up to the tide, and saw where they continued straight into the water and disappeared.

Unnerved, Danny looked up at the black ocean, glittering in the moonlight, expecting to see Vlad Masters's silver hair bobbing out of the waves at any second. There was nothing. Even the fog was gone.

Somehow, Mr. Masters had walked into the ocean and vanished.

Danny didn't know how long he stood around waiting for the billionaire to reappear before he gave up and went home.

Neither did he know when the thought first entered his head, or when it solidified into a hunch, and then a theory, and then a certainty. Maybe it was when Mr. Masters had appeared at Fentonworks the next day unscathed, like nothing had happened. There was only one explanation:

Vlad Masters was just like him.

It was the only thing that made sense. At some point, maybe when he was captured and held hostage those twenty years ago, a merperson had done to him exactly what Kaima had done to Danny and turned him half-merfolk. Maybe that was why he sought revenge now. Or maybe he was just looking for a cure. Who knew the reasons he was hunting merfolk?

Danny just needed to prove it.

The adults went back to their conversation.

"I simply don't understand," said Maddie, twirling her fork pensively. "We've deployed the BBs twice since then, checked and rechecked all of the buoys, done a thorough sweep up and down the coast, and found-"

"Absolutely nothing," grumbled Jack.

"I'm certain there was a second intruder," Maddie insisted. "The BB caught it on camera!"

Danny nearly knocked his plate into his lap. "It did what now?" Since when did the Baby Buoys have cameras on them?

"Photographed 'em!" said Jack enthusiastically. "The Baby got their pictures clear as day, right before they murdered it. Died a hero, it did." The big man sniffed and wiped away a tear.

Danny went cold. That BB had been a foot away from them, and he'd stuck his whole head out of the water. Like a dimwit.

"That doesn't solve our problem, though," said Maddie. "We followed the female back to sea, but the buoys never registered the male exiting our perimeter. What if it's still in here somewhere?"

"I'm sure you'll find it," said Mr. Masters in a conspicuously syrupy voice - to Maddie, and only Maddie. "If anyone here is capable of doing so, it's you."

Danny frowned. Waitdid he just… flirt… with my mom?

"We really appreciate you taking the time to check our equipment, Vlad," said Maddie, oblivious to this.

"It is an honor, my dear. It's been too long."

No, he's totally flirting with my mom. Gross!

Danny didn't know whether to feel relieved or repulsed that Vlad Masters might also be half-merfolk. On the one hand, it'd be good to know he wasn't a total one-of-a-kind freak. On the other, he would hate for his only comrade, the only person in the world who could understand what he was going through and help him out, to be this guy.

He glanced at Jazz to confirm that he wasn't going crazy and Mr. Masters really was flirting with their mom, right in front of their dad's nose. His sister was wearing a look of revulsion, more than what could be attributed to a conversation about merhunting, and when she caught him looking, she raised her brows at Danny in a meaningful way. He nodded very slightly and shuddered just enough for her to see. She nodded back.

It was easy to talk to a sibling without using words, and they didn't even need mind-speak.

Danny cast his eyes around the table, looking for some other tool he could use. Everyone else's glasses were too far away… His gaze landed on his own. Good thing I've always been a klutz.

He quickly polished off his plate, took it and his still-full glass into his arms, and as he walked past Mr. Masters to the kitchen sink, very deliberately stumbled and dumped the water right into the billionaire's face.

He jumped back out of the splash zone and waited.

And waited.

And as Vlad Masters did nothing more than begin to sop up the water with his handkerchief, Danny's jaw dropped. "What…but you…why aren't you…?"

"Danny!" Maddie Fenton scolded, leaping to her feet and rushing to fetch a towel from one of the kitchen cabinets. "At least apologize. Where are your manners, young man?"

"It's quite alright," said Vlad, his hair dripping water on the floor. He looked up at Danny and smirked, eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly. "What harm is a little water, eh Daniel?"

Danny felt the hand that clutched the glass itching, and glancing down saw it starting to turn white where the water had run down the side of the glass. He quickly wiped his hand on his jeans, turned to put everything in the sink, mumbled an apology, and rushed from the room.

"I'm so sorry, Vlad, he's never been like this," he heard his mother saying.

"Think nothing of it," the man replied, and that was all Danny heard before he reached his bedroom and closed himself inside.

He looked down at his left hand, at the swath of pearly white skin there. No one had seen, right? Right?

Trembling, Danny sat down on the edge of his bed and stared at his hand, watching the skin fade back to human pink. He couldn't believe it. Nothing. He'd doused Vlad Masters in water, and absolutely nothing had happened. Was he wrong? Was Mr. Masters not part-mer after all?

Then how did he vanish into the fog like that?


"Maybe he's a vampire?" suggested Tucker as they left school Thursday.

Danny stared back, not amused. "You're not taking this seriously, Tuck." They'd been discussing Mr. Masters's disappearing act on and off for the whole day, and each of Tucker's suggestions was more ludicrous than the one before.

"Danny, come on, this is Vlad Masters you're talking about. He's one of the richest and most successful people in the world. That's like asking me to believe that Gandhi was actually Bigfoot."

"Weren't you the one telling me you believed in the Kraken? And just how is this much harder to believe than the fact that Vlad Masters was kidnapped off of a boat twenty years ago by giant water tentacles and held hostage for a month while his shipmates were eaten by cannibalistic fish people?"

Tucker took a deep breath, preparing to argue, and then let it go in a 'whoosh'. "Okay, when you put it like that…"

"Tucker, I'm telling you, something is not right about that guy."

"Danny, no offense, and I'm not even saying you're wrong-"

"Just the fact that you're saying this means you think that I'm wrong."

"-but you are kind of paranoid," finished Tucker, wincing sympathetically.

"I'm not paranoid!" argued Danny. A few people walking near them hushed and hurried away, and so Danny lowered his voice and repeated, "I'm not paranoid."

"Danny, my friend," said Tuck, "you are a lot of things, and paranoid is definitely one of them. So, deliberately changing the topic, you wanna go to the Nasty Burger?"

Danny hefted his backpack on his shoulders and said, "I'm not in the mood. I'm just going to go home. I'll talk to you later." Without waiting for Tucker to protest, he hurried on ahead and wasn't entirely surprised when Tucker didn't bother trying to catch up.

He knew he should have felt guilty, or worried, or something. He and Tuck never fought, yet this whole week they'd been at odds. He was just tired of Tucker treating everything like it was a joke.

He hadn't even tried telling Tucker about the rest of it. For example, the dreams he had been having.

The last two nights, since what happened at the swim meet, Danny had been having flashbacks to his time in the ocean while he slept. The dreams themselves weren't frightening. When he woke up, he could never remember more than the feeling of warm water surrounding him, cool currents rushing underneath, light sparkling far ahead, and weightlessness like he was floating in outer space. It was calm, peaceful; it was disappointing to have to leave them.

The only times he'd had dreams about the ocean before now had been dreams of drowning in black and frigid water, to wake up gasping and covered in a cold sweat in his bed. What disturbed Danny now was the fact that he wasn't scared by these dreams at all. More than that was the disconcerting feeling when he woke up: not until he moved them did he remember that he had legs.

There were other things. No matter where he was, he could point to the ocean. He'd never had any sense of the cardinal directions before, but now he always knew where east was, because that was the direction of the Atlantic. In general, he was becoming more and more sensitive to water – salt, fresh, chlorinated. He knew how many water bottles were in a classroom without looking. He could tell if the school pool was being used by cocking his head and listening carefully. He knew if the guy next to him was sweating more than usual.

All of it had him a little on edge. What was happening with Vlad Masters was just the tip of this iceberg. So, if Tuck couldn't even take that much seriously, how was Danny to expect him to understand the rest of it?

Danny reached Fentonworks and without thinking about it wandered over to the beach stairs. Dropping his backpack at his feet, he leaned on the wooden railing and looked out at his old enemy, the ocean. In the late afternoon sun, it was deep blue, the waves tipped white and the currents glinting golden in the sun. Clouds left black shadows on the surface. The Fentonworks beach was empty, like always, but further down the coast, Danny could see beachgoers taking advantage of the last few days of warm weather.

There was a gnawing in his chest. His heart began to beat more loudly in his ears. His limbs were growing shaky. It was the Neptune High pool all over again.

He lowered his forehead onto the rail. "What's wrong with me?"

Just then, the staircase began to shudder. At first, Danny just furrowed his brows but didn't look up. But the shaking got worse. Annoyed, and a little worried that the wooden staircase was finally giving up the ghost, Danny raised his head and looked around.

It was then that something wrapped around his legs and pulled.

Danny's back slammed into the wooden landing, and suddenly he was dangling upside-down in midair several dozen feet above the beach. Gasping for breath, scrambling to grab hold of anything, Danny saw it.

Hanging on to the scaffolding of the staircase with seven of its eight legs was the largest octopus Danny had ever seen. Its head alone was the size of a compact car, its body like a circus tent, its legs like eight-inch-thick, suction-cupped cables. It was bright red; it was angry; it was holding Danny in its tight, suction-y grip.

Danny stared. His first thought was – The Kraken. And then he screamed. "Ahhhhhhh!"

That only made it angrier. With its massive tentacle, it shook Danny from side to side and up and down until Danny not only stopped screaming but thought he was going to puke. It passed Danny to another tentacle, which wrapped around his waist. Then, Danny hanging limp in its grasp, it started to scale the staircase back to the beach.

Not a minute later, they reached the sand. The giant octopus held Danny aloft with one of its legs and used its others to whirl across the sand toward the water.

Danny regained enough of his senses to start struggling again. He beat his fists on the tentacle around his middle, to no effect, unless he had wanted it to squeeze him tighter, in which case it would have been a total success. The octopus reached the water, and Danny knew instinctively that if it got back into the ocean, he was a goner; so, he did what anyone should do when they're being grabbed by a hostile entity.

He sunk his teeth in.

The octopus let go, and did so by flinging him several feet through the air. Danny landed hard on his back in the wet, well-packed sand. The air was forcefully evacuated from his lungs, and a second later a wave came in and swept over his head, shoulders, all the way to his waist, and back out again. The change happened fast – pins-and-needles tingling all over his upper body, a dull ache filling his bones.

When he tried to breathe again and couldn't, at first he wasn't sure if it was because he had been winded or because he had gills again.

Either way, he didn't have time to sit and think about it. He rolled away just in time for the octopus to not grab him again, but wasn't so lucky when its second and third arms reached for him. They lifted him by one leg and one arm into the air.

Danny gasped, and he could breathe again. His white hair was plastered across his forehead and into his eyes, so he shook it away to get a better look at the monster that was about to dismember him.

I don't care what it thinks, I'm not about to be killed by the Kraken.

Danny thrashed, but it did no good. The octopus just squeezed him tighter and glared at him with its huge, horizontal pupils. Frantic, Danny looked around, looking for anyone who could help him – where are my parents with the Fenton Harpoons when you need them? – or anything he could use to escape.

The ocean crashed against the octopus's lower body. That's when Danny knew.

Danny could feel it in his heart, the tide pushing and pulling. He could also feel the octopus in his arm and leg, but it was just pulling. His joints were starting to strain.

Danny squeezed his eyes shut. He saw an image of the Fenton Baby Buoy that Kaima had destroyed, the water shooting like a geyser from its deck. He felt the waves come in, and felt them go out. The next time they came, he opened his eyes, and was able to watch as a spear of ocean water shot up from under the octopus and came out the top of its head.

Screeching horribly, it dropped Danny into the foot of water below and began to thrash, throwing up wet sand and arcs of its own, blackish blood. It thundered like this for a few seconds, then crashed to the ground, and finally stilled.

Danny scrambled off of the wet sand before the water came back, but he could already feel the damage done. His feet were growing, pressing against the insides of his water-logged sneakers, and his legs hurt worse with every passing second, which probably had something to do with the fact he was wearing jeans while his tail was trying to form. Shaking, he tore off his shoes and tugged off his jeans and boxers. Before he'd gotten the clothes fully off, his legs all the way to his knees had started fusing together.

He realized, too late, that he had never been awake for this before.

He tried not to think about it too much. It was clear what was happening. His skin, after becoming black scales, would attach from one leg to the other, and only when all of this was a single piece did the bones and muscles start to shift.

It wasn't painful, per se, but it was deeply uncomfortable. It also happened much more quickly than Danny thought it would. Between getting drenched in the tide (and some octopus guts, to be honest), it didn't take more than two minutes to completely shift.

Then it was over, and Danny was once again a merperson lying on the Fentonworks beach, only this time not one hundred feet from the entrance to the lab. Not to mention the giant octopus corpse nearby.

"Perfect," he huffed, and fell back in the sand.

After a couple of minutes of lying there and being, if not happy, at least relieved and a little shocked to be alive, Danny dug his phone out of his pants, discovered that it still worked, and called Tucker.

He answered after three rings, sounding grumpy: "What is it, Danny?"

"Tuck?" said Danny. "Hey, I'm sorry about earlier. You were right about the Kraken. Um… think you could help me out?"

"So now you want my help… Wait, what do you mean, the Kraken?"

"It's a long story," said Danny. "Please, Tuck. I'm on the beach in front of the lab, and I'm having a bit of a situation."

"What kind of situation?"

Danny sighed. "What kind of situation do you think?"

"…Oh! That kind of situation. Why didn't you say so?"

"So, yeah, time is of the essence?"

"Got it! Be right there!"

Danny hung up the phone and decided to see if he still remembered how to move his tail, only to discover that he was already transitioning back to legs, a slightly less uncomfortable process than the other way around. The hot sand on one side and the sun on the other were drying him quickly. It wasn't long before he was able to put his boxers on and stand back up again.

He didn't quite understand what he watched happen next.


"That's the Kraken?" said Tucker, poking it with a stick.

"I swear, it was a lot bigger earlier."

"This thing's the size of a Chihuahua."

The ocean waves had washed away the blood. They had flattened out the sand. There was nothing to prove that the pathetic ball of tentacles lying on the beach had once been the size of a mini-van.

Except maybe…

"Look!" said Danny, pulling up his shirt. Under the damp fabric, his skin was still white, but it was also one other thing. Bruised. Golf-ball sized, sucker-shaped, purpling bruises. "I was obviously not attacked by a Chihuahua-pus earlier, Tuck. I'm telling you, it shrunk."

The bruises seemed to do the trick. Tucker was thoroughly impressed, if also a bit sickened.

"Where did it come from?" he asked, now two shades paler.

Danny shrugged. "I didn't see it until it was right on top of me. Or right under me."

"I can't believe your parents' tech didn't register a giant octopus swimming toward Amity Beach."

"I think it's only meant to track merpeople. Which this wasn't. And if I hadn't figured out how to use my powers just now, I would have been dead meat."

Tucker perked up. "You used your powers to fight the Kraken? Dude, you've got to show me!"

Despite everything, despite the aches and lingering terror and fast-crashing energy levels, Danny smiled. "Yeah, I don't see why not. Alright, stand back."

Dutifully, Tucker backed away about five feet as Danny approached the water. At the edge of the wet sand, he spread his bare feet, cracked his knuckles, held out his hands, and when the waves hit the beach, he willed a wall of water to rise into the air.

The water ignored him and flowed back out to sea.

"Uh… hang on…" Frowning, Danny readjusted his stance and tried it again, but this time imagined something smaller, just another spear of water shooting into the air.

Nothing.

"Are you building suspense, or was that it?" came Tucker's voice.

Danny dropped his arms and stomped back through the sand. "I don't get it! It worked before!"

"I believe you. You did it last week when it was raining, too," said Tuck. "Maybe you have to feel threatened? Want me to attack you?"

"Tuck, the last thing I want right now is to be attacked. Again." Seriously, how many people and/or creatures had attacked him since the start of school? "Actually, the only thing I want right now is to get as far away from here as I can." His stomach chose then to grumble loudly. "And apparently to eat something."

Tucker grinned. "I know where we can do both of those things."


They squeezed into a corner booth at the Nasty Burger with four Monster Nasty Meals and two Mega Nasty Drinks. Danny was still a bit covered in sand, but he had gotten some fresh clothes and flip-flops before coming.

They both ate an entire burger and an entire carton of fries before either said a word – eating was serious business, after all.

"You should train," said Tucker, slurping at his Mega Nasty Drink. "In case this happens again."

"I don't think this is going to happen again."

"Did you think it was going to happen this time?"

"…"

Tucker nodded smugly. "That's my point."

Danny heaved a sigh and slouched into the booth. Some of the last of the sand sprinkled onto the seat and floor. "Okay. Yeah, I should train. It's not like I can go down to the beach and practice whenever I want, though. Not only are my parents on high-alert right now, there are two mermen headhunters who would probably like to throw me back in prison. Not to mention whatever shady thing Mr. Masters is up to."

"Just because you don't like him doesn't mean it has to be shady," Tucker said, ever the peace-keeper.

Screwing up his face, Danny reluctantly agreed. "I guess… Anyway, the beach is off limits, and somehow I think my bathtub isn't a much better option."

They both paused a moment to imagine Danny as a merperson stuffed into a five-foot-long porcelain tub. Tucker snorted, and Danny threw a French fry at him.

After a small war involving several potato projectiles and one angry cashier, Tucker frowned thoughtfully at the table and said –

"So, what about the pool?"


A/N: I want to say this right away - no matter what Danny and Tucker think, that was not the Kraken. I repeat, not the Kraken.

In this chapter, we have our first fight scene - and by fight scene, I mean the first one in which Danny gets to throw a punch, not just take them. As this is quite heavily drawing on plot elements from the original show, I wanted to nod to Danny Phantom's first enemies, the ecto-puses.

We also have Vlad being, well, Vlad. Danny's figuring out his powers more and more, being kind of a jerk to Tucker, who is in all honesty a good friend. At least he got his Nasty Burger in the end. Hang in there, Tuck.

I'm not sure when I'll get the next chapter up, but I hope before the end of the week. It's a chapter I've been waiting a long time to write, so I want to spend a bit more time on it...

Thanks to my lovely reviewers: Izi Wilson, Crescental, Kiomori, RedHeadsRock1010, Invader Johnny, DB-KT, lexi1220, and Pterodactyl.

See you next time! T.F.C~